Ransomware Resilience with Zerto – Test and Recover

Even the best laid plans can come undone unless frequent and extensive testing can be completed. Utilizing Zerto’s automation and orchestration capabilities organizations can now test non-disruptively in isolated networks or clean rooms to ensure they are ransomware ready, once testing has been completed ready-made compliance reports make passing audits and regulatory requirements easy.

Chris Rogers, senior technology evangelist at Zerto, discusses the importance of ransomware resilience and testing in data recovery. Zerto has been emphasizing the need for simple, non-impactful testing for years, especially in the context of security. Chris highlights the significance of frequent and extensive testing, rather than just checking a single virtual machine or performing a single restore. By using Zerto, customers have significantly reduced their testing time, completing it in less than two hours compared to three and a half days previously. The testing is fully automated, orchestrated, and does not impact production workloads. Zerto customers perform over 18,000 tests per month on average, with an impressive average recovery time objective (RTO) of three minutes and 19 seconds. Chris also mentions the ability to conduct real-time testing and utilize the isolated recovery environment for various purposes, such as patch testing, vulnerability scanning, data analytics, and forensics. While Zerto does not replace antivirus tools or have official partnerships with malware cleanup companies, they provide the infrastructure and availability for recovery, allowing customers to bring their own tooling and layer additional security measures on top. Zerto offers different recovery options for ransomware, including instant file restore, instant VM restore, recovery from multi-VM app infection, recovery from single site infection using the cloud or secondary site, and extended journal copy for multi-site infection recovery. The recently introduced Rapid Air Gap Recovery using the cyber resilience vault provides an additional layer of protection. Chris acknowledges that Zerto’s focus is not on detection but on recovery, and customers still have work to do in removing the malware or encryption. However, the vault allows customers to recover applications into an isolated environment where they can leverage their own tools and scan the recovered VMs for any infections.