Resilience is a key requirement to success, whether at the national level or at the corporate level. That was the core message from former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden in his keynote message to attendees at this year's annual ZertoCON 2017, held in Boston.

Providing a fascinating insight into how threats - both in a general sense and cyber threats in particular - have evolved over the years, General Hayden stressed how the need to be resilient has become essential in the modern age. He outlined how organizations and government have adapted to ensure they are protected against threats - and must continue to do so in the future.

He warned that criminals and nation states continue to exploit the shift to digital, and that companies need to broaden their view how they protect against this new and increasingly sophisticated wave of crime. General Hayden proposed a risk equation that organizations ought to apply to define the risk they were taking with their data: analyzing the threat (intelligence) times the consequences (defending the data) times the vulnerability (holes in the perimeter fence).

Zerto CEO and founder Ziv Kedem echoed General Hayden's theme of resilience in his own address at the event and he welcomed attendees who are joining Zerto on its journey to create uninterrupted technology. Predicting that business continuity would progress towards a focus on IT resilience, Kedem noted that organizations are starting to look at their capabilities to not only recover, but adjust to misfortune or change - with a key focus on change. One of the biggest changes that IT is trying to adopt is cloud and to truly embrace the cloud, IT resilience is key. But, this is a two way street, adopting the cloud actually enables IT resilience. To watch Kedem elaborate on this concept and speak with customer about their IT resilience stories, watch the full presentation. 

Speaking specifically about the "push button DR" simplicity and bi-directional failover of Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR), Kedem asserted that Zerto was the first company to truly connect all the dots for hybrid IT and "the first time that hybrid cloud has been fully realized". Customers could go to the cloud, come back from the cloud and move both ways without fears of data loss or damage. Kedem revealed the company's IT resilience message was gaining traction, with Zerto breaking the 5,000 customer barrier and growing its partner community to more than 1,700 channel partners including resellers, systems integrators, and cloud service providers.

Also part of the ZertoCon 2017 speaker lineup were analysts from 451 Research, Forrester and Gartner, who emphasized the importance of IT resilience in a discussion on the future of IT. In an incredibly informative session, with some strong input from the audience, the panel discussed the major trends in disaster recovery, backup and security.

Keeping the focus on the future, Zerto vice president of product, Rob Strechay, built on Kedem's keynote and provided insights into the ZVR product roadmap, including a sneak peek at the forthcoming release, currently named Balvenie.

The highlights of the product due for release this summer include enterprise application replication and recovery from Microsoft Azure, real-time and historical trend analytics capabilities for any Zerto protected multi-target environment, and other cloud-enabling enhancements. This enables organizations to fully realize the potential of hybrid cloud, with complete application mobility across on-premise and public cloud infrastructures.  

Still staying with the overriding theme of resilience, breakout sessions at ZertoCON 2017 placed a strong emphasis on how best to use some of the myriad cloud options available to help achieve IT resilience. There was also a major focus on APIs with automation being one of the hottest topics at the conference, along with a number of partner and customer-led sessions providing insights into how organizations are using Zerto for a myriad of use case scenarios including migrations, disaster recovery, enabling cloud strategy implementation, and more.

The conference concluded with a series of awards presented to partners are constantly striving to provide end users with better IT resilience capabilities through their work with Zerto and customers who have demonstrated best practices that help their organizations to achieve uninterrupted business and enable growth.

In only its second year, the increasing attendance at ZertoCON is reinforcement of the growing interst from businesses and IT leaders to ensure that they are using the best business continuity, disaster recovery and cloud strategies to empower their organizations. 2018 is sure to be even bigger!