In late April, Zerto announced the general availability of Zerto 7.0, an IT Resilience Platform which addresses digital transformation challenges by transforming the way backup is done through continuous data protection and innovative journaling technology. VMblog spoke with Caroline Seymour, Zerto's VP of Product Marketing, to learn more about the 'better-than-backup' technology.

VMblog:  Before we dive any further, tell us, what is "IT Resilience?"

Caroline Seymour:  IT Resilience is an organization's ability to seamlessly adapt to change while protecting its business and customers from disruptions. Operating as an IT resilient business means you are ready for any type of disruption, planned or unplanned, so that you can mitigate the risk of downtime and data loss. This ultimately provides IT resilient organizations a competitive advantage because less downtime equates to more activity that drives revenue-building transformation.

VMblog:  We discussed this platform a little bit last year, at ZertoCON.  Can you tell us, why is this release so significant?

Seymour:  Zerto 7.0 is an alternative to legacy backup bringing its leading Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology to solve for backup use cases; legacy backup is far too archaic for today's speed of business. As the industry knows it today, backup is done periodically. Our customers see disruptions coming in from all angles at all times, from human error to ransomware and natural disasters. In this environment, periodic backup is simply no longer relevant.  Zerto 7.0 changes the landscape completely with CDP as the foundation to a platform that converges disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility. On top of that, our platform provides leading journaling and replication technology, both for short-term and long-term data retention. This combination of functionality allows our customers to combine historically siloed processes which ultimately increases efficiency, performance and proactive IT transformation.

VMblog:  Zerto's CEO and Co-Founder, Ziv Kedem, characterizes this product as one that is intended to "disrupt the dormant backup market."  People call themselves disruptors all the time these days.  To truly be disruptive, you must fundamentally alter what is accepted as the norm.  Are you truly confident that this product will have this impact?  And if so, why?

Seymour:  Absolutely. As stated above, the norm today is periodic backup, and it's a norm that is frustrating countless businesses. Periodic is not sufficient. Customer demand for Zerto 7.0 is proving that the industry is ready for continuous resilience to be the new norm. Quite frankly, it has to be as periodic backup ultimately equates to unsustainable downtime and data loss.

Additionally, over 90% of businesses today don't consider themselves to be IT resilient, yet the majority of these businesses view IT resilience as foundational to successfully achieving the digital transformation required to remain competitive. The norm of periodic backup won't get them there, but as our more than 6,000 customers can attest, a platform with disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility all in one seamless package, can.

Seymour:  A key feature we added to the Zerto 7.0 platform is a unique Elastic Journal that combines the granular journal technology with long-term repositories. This allows for a continuous stream of recovery points with intelligent index and search technology. This applies to recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time. In addition, traditional backup methods do not provide consistent recovery of an entire application, and all its VM dependencies, to a consistent point in time. With Zerto 7.0 we can now deliver consistent recovery not only for short term data retention but also the long-term retention which is a unique capability of the platform.

Seymour:  Without Zerto 7.0, disaster recovery and backup have to be done separately. This is just today's norm. Traditionally, both processes are incredibly labor intensive and time consuming. By streamlining and combining the two processes into one, our customers' IT teams are saving considerable hours not having to manage DR and backup separately. Furthermore, the convergence also allows IT teams to replicate just once, instead of separately, for both DR and backup. While this saves times as well, it also presents considerable cost savings.

Now, imagine being able to do all of that within a platform that also allows you to easily migrate workloads to, from and between Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud and/or your CSP with absolutely no impact to production. For our 7.0 customers, this is a reality.

Seymour:  With this release, customers can now complete robust resource planning and ‘what-if' scenario modelling. Using Zerto Analytics, organizations can continuously monitor and analyze compute, storage and network resources across on-premises environments as well as public, private and hybrid clouds.

This gives our customers exciting new insights across clouds or disparate infrastructures to help them make better data-driven decisions. Making these ‘better decisions' means our customers are taking informed actions that are not only helping them become IT resilient, but also saving them time and money. 

VMblog:  In an age of disruptions, how can Zerto 7.0 help ensure businesses avoid potential downtime?

Seymour:  Today's data threats are bigger than they were last year and they'll be even bigger next year. Hackers and cybercriminals are only getting more and more sophisticated, and security measures are not always enough. In fact, they often can't keep up. That means that businesses absolutely have to assume that at some point (likely more than once) an attack is going to get through. So, what then? If your organization has Zerto 7.0, a member of your IT team makes a few clicks and all of your data is restored back to the second before the attack took place. Your employees go about their job not realizing anything happened and your customers' or end-users' experience is unchanged.

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Caroline Seymour – Director, Product Marketing, Zerto

Caroline Seymour is the product marketing director for Zerto, based in Boston, US and has been with Zerto for one year.  In this role Caroline leads overall product marketing strategy and execution. Prior to Zerto, Caroline was at IBM for nine years and has a wealth of experience in the Enterprise software space from the many roles she has held in Europe and in North America, covering pre-sales, product marketing and partner marketing.