Delivering instant ransomware recovery

Ransomware attacks continue to grow in severity and volume, bringing increasing costs and growing financial, legal, and even political ramifications. Organisations must invest in technology that allows them to recover and resume operations quickly following a ransomware attack, not just protect against it. Based on a foundation of 12 years of expertise with continuous data protection (CDP), Zerto enables organisations to move on from a ransomware attack with minimal data loss and downtime by allowing users to rewind and recover data with granularity from any point in time—and do so within seconds of a disruptive event.

Zerto 9 enables immutability settings for long-term data retention to be easily managed from within the Zerto user interface. As a result, users can set how long backups can remain unaltered, safeguarding them to the cloud to prevent malicious deletion or modification of data, including ransomware. In this release, immutability support is available for Amazon S3.

“Zerto 9 enables organisations to defend their business from the consequences of ransomware, and with fully orchestrated failover and failback, organisations can recover infected applications and data from just seconds back,” said Deepak Verma, vice president, product management for Zerto. “With just a few clicks, our journal-based recovery is flexible enough to recover only what is needed, whether that’s files, virtual machines, or an entire application stack from a point-in-time. As ransomware attacks continue to escalate, these are game-changing capabilities that we have had built into our platform for many years now, and they just keep getting better with every release.”

“It’s vital to keep our infrastructure and data safe from the risks associated with ransomware,” said Alan Barrett, head of IT, TWM Solicitors LLP. “By adopting Zerto, we are maximising the protection of our systems, and in the event of a malware attack, we can rewind and recover data with granularity from any point in time and do so within seconds of a disruptive event with minimal data loss and downtime.”

Zerto 9 adds new automated VM protection to ensure complete, flexible data protection across each environment even when new VMs are added. Using native vSphere tags, servers can now be instantly added to Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) without any manual configuration to quickly protect workloads with new or existing protection groups and apply existing SLA rules, including pre-validation and alerts.

New instant restore has been added so that Zerto users can restore VMs straight into production easily and quickly without having to worry about failing over to a DR site first or running out of resources on overtaxed backup appliances. Preserving journal checkpoints allows users to revert to other points in time quickly for the same VM if the selected restore point does not meet requirements. This has been coupled with restore of files or directories by downloading them or by restoring them directly into its original location from any long-term retention (LTR) repository such as public cloud.

New Capabilities for End Users and Managed Service Providers

Zerto 9 continues to advance its backup and disaster recovery capabilities to include new support for additional cloud platforms and new cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management for both end users and managed service providers.

For instance, long-term retention repositories can now be stored on S3-compatible on-premises or cloud storage such as Cloudian. In addition, users can also tier LTR data to Amazon S3-IA and S3 Glacier as well as Azure Blob Cool and Archive storage classes by defining retention policies within Zerto 9. Native cloud APIs to tier backups are leveraged to eliminate compute costs associated with tiering data in public cloud.

Backup is now managed within its own separate context within the Zerto user interface. A new type of virtual protection group (VPG) called local continuous backup VPG enables easy configuration and management of CDP-based backups and long-term retention of VMs. This new VPG provides users with the ability to segregate less critical VMs which require only backup and restore from the critical VMs that need full Zerto disaster recovery features.

“As a bank, it’s critical that our services are available to our customers 24/7/365 and free from disruptions, and Zerto makes us confident we can deliver on that,” said Steve Walcott, senior server specialist, FirstCaribbean International Bank. “Zerto gives us the continuous data protection we need, and we’re very excited about the enhanced cloud services in Zerto 9. Being able to securely and cost-effectively manage more data in the cloud will help keep the business nimble and our customers satisfied.”