Questions from Our Disaster Recovery Webinar

Recently, Michele Corvino, Cloud Product Manager at Flexential, and Jason Nolan, Cloud Sales Account Manager at Zerto, conducted a disaster recovery webinar titled Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery—Strategies and Solutions That Can Save Your Business. The discussion generated some incisive questions from attendees, ranging from specific DRaaS solutions, cloud security and many more. In this blog we attempt to address several attendee questions as a follow-up to the webinar.

Webinar Questions:

1.How does Zerto handle data not in the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)?
Zerto replicates the VMs and the data related to it. If it isn’t in the VMFS, it is not covered by Zerto.

2.Can Zerto support a customer who has been hit with ransomware and revert to a point prior to the event?
Yes. In Zerto, if a ransomware attack hits your data, you can failover to your disaster recovery site using the journal history and select a point in time before the attack happened, sometimes even seconds before the attack. Before you commit to that time slot, you can test it out to verify that the time is as close to the attack as it can get to minimize data loss. Then, you can push the good data back to the production site.

3.If the cloud is redundant, why do I need disaster recovery?
Even though the cloud may have redundancy built in, in most cases, the redundancy is only applicable to the hardware and infrastructure levels. Cloud does not equate to disaster recovery or business continuity because it does not address two important factors--the application layer and data center location redundancy.If you or your cloud provider house the hardware and infrastructure redundancy in the same location as your production site and the location goes down, there goes your data. If you’re taking advantage of cloud, you need to make sure you have a failover site in a different location.For the application layer, you have to ensure your applications are able to spin up other VMs in the event of a disaster. For example, in AWS, you have to orchestrate your application to automagically to spin up another instance if your instance died.

4.What percentage of disaster recovery is natural disaster based?
Natural disasters happen, but they are not the main cause of business disruptions. Jason has seen some reports stating that natural disasters account for about 20-25% of the activities that lead to disaster recovery. This means that around 80% of the time, the disruption is related to hardware, software, infrastructure failure or even human-error.

Do you have more questions? Reach out to us! We’re here to help and share our knowledge and passion for creating Hybrid IT solutions.