Zerto goes beyond the traditional firewall, antivirus

• Businesses should consider data protection as part of their overall security plan
• Though SEA presents unique challenges, Zerto intends to invest more in the region

DISASTER strikes when you least expect it, be it natural disasters or man-made ones like data breaches.

Recently, the second largest bank in Malaysia, CIMB Bank reported that some magnetic tapes containing backup customer data were lost during transit. Before that, the data of 46 million mobile phone subscribers from different telcos was leaked online.

As business and mission-critical applications for large companies are increasingly run in virtualised environments, keeping those applications available to their customers 24/7 is crucial.

“It has become so complex and distributed that the risk of something genuinely affecting you is not that it might happen but it is something that is likely to happen,” said virtual data replication (DR) software provider Zerto vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan Andrew Martin in a recent phone interview with Digital News Asia.

There is no doubt that businesses need first defences like firewalls and antiviruses to protect themselves from attacks or breaches but if a ransomware manages to get in and lock out critical data, that is where Zerto steps in.

Zerto says it offers data replication as a service (DRaaS) as a line of defence that allows its customers to withstand any disruption and ensure business continuity. The company says its restoration of services is far more immediate than traditional solutions like backup where it could take up to hours to recover.

Zerto said it offers its services to data centres both on-premises and in the cloud. While Zerto does not offer secondary sites to host data, it says its virtual data replication software works with over 400 cloud service providers around the world like IBM Cloud, Azure and Amazon Web Services to ensure disaster recovery and IT resilience for virtualised and cloud datacentres.

“We bring your business applications back to a point before the ransomware hits you. We can commit to having your systems back up and running to that exact point in time, all within two minutes,” says Martin.

But it is not just for data recovery in the event of a disaster. Zerto also works in other situations like a big migration project where it can replicate an application and have it running on the cloud, also in just minutes.

Even after the migration, should a business find that the performance is not satisfactory or is too expensive to run, they can just as easily roll it back.

“It is not just about protection but about giving the flexibility to work in a world that needs to be flexible,” says Martin.

Bigger plans for Southeast Asia

With its regional headquarter in Singapore, Zerto is servicing clients across major Southeast Asian markets including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore itself. Surprisingly, awareness of the importance of data protection is high in the region as businesses are often willing to invest to keep their data protected.

In Singapore, Martin (pic, right) explains, businesses are more conservative and are less open to risk. They are therefore, willing to spend but the challenge for Zerto is making itself stand out among the bigger players. The same is true for the Philippines where IT personnel understand and want to buy-in for the protection.

However, Malaysia proves to be particularly challenging for Zerto as businesses understand the need for data protection but do not want to spend more for anything other than the basic backup protection that they have in place.

Moving forward, Zerto said it plans to place more focus in the Asean region in 2018 as the awareness of data protection is spreading and this includes the different verticals from banking, manufacturing and insurance.

Competition is expected to heat up and Zerto said it plans to double down on its operations here and invest more.

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