CTO Essentials for IT Resilience in a Hybrid-Cloud World
Transcript
>> Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's presentation sponsored by Zerto, the CTO advisor. Our title for today's presentation is the CTO Essentials for IT Resilience in a Hybrid-Cloud World. And for today's speaker, it's myself, Andy Fernandez. I'm Product Marketing Manager at Zerto. I just want to thank everybody here for your time. I know we have a lot going on. So I really appreciate you coming in and listening to this presentation around IT resilience. Now for today's agenda, we're going to make an introduction, kind of set the stage for our discussion today.
And then really talk about the evaluation criteria between on-premises versus cloud, we're going to look at options such as public cloud, even VMware on public cloud, and then finally, disaster recovery as a service or DRaaS as we know it. After that, we'll talk about Zerto's value, specifically the value of the Zerto IT Resilience Platform, understand what it's made out of, what's our secret sauce, and then what's the economic impact and the ROI that Zerto delivers into space as well. And we'll leave room for questions as well.
Now, when you think about today's environment, all of us and all of the technical organizations, have several digital initiatives. But it seems like that most organizations are now going through a forced or an accelerated digital transformation. Now, the one thing that hasn't changed, if not it's gotten even more strict or demanding, is the fact that we need 24/7 availability. All CIOs, all organizations are expecting no downtime, they want to reduce the amount of data loss and they want availability. But you have to manage this, as an IT organization and still have to support and build new infrastructure for supporting remote work to maintain your level of cybersecurity, but also address the continued data growth and sprawl.
And finally, be able to manage your resources. That includes your time, your labor, your budget, and this all requires a lot of changes, in rethinking the way we approach things. Now, historically, right, in the last few years, we've been looking at the cloud as an option. And we've always been bombarded with all these statistics, about how everyone is going cloud first, and how everyone is going to solve all the problems with the cloud, right? And it's obvious why. There are a lot of reasons, why over 80% of organizations, have what they call a cloud-first strategy, meaning it's their first option.
Now, there's cost benefits, there's growth benefits, it's more scalable, more innovative, it makes the organization more agile, if done correctly. But it's not a panacea. It's not the solution for all and it's not a viable strategy for an organization to go all cloud immediately. You need to be able to have a transition. To be able to slowly deploy and transfer, migrate certain operations, certain workloads to the cloud, and deploy what people call a hybrid cloud architecture. " Now, as we think of some of the more crucial operations in our business, and what could be potentially a viable factor to immediately migrate something to the cloud, well, disaster recovery, or backup or BC/DR, are all really viable options to be able to extend the footprint of your data center towards the cloud, but to be able to retain your on-premises environments, until you have a full mastery and understanding of what your real cloud strategy is and how your organization is going to deploy that.
So as we talk about disaster recovery, we at Zerto see that as a significant step, towards a hybrid cloud strategy. Now, why is disaster recovery so important? Well think about our environments today. And these stats come from the state of IT resilience report that we sponsored with IDC, last year in 2019. And then identified what are the costs of disruption to the business. Now, out of the people surveyed or the organizations and enterprises surveyed, the average cost of downtime per hour, across all industries and organizational sizes, are around $250,000 an hour.
Now this is an aggregated number. So if you're a much smaller SMB or startup, this number is going to be a little bit lower. But could you imagine what that number looks like for the fortune 500, or even the fortune 100. Now, collectively, in the aggregate, the total cost of unplanned downtime and disruptions through the year, were $2 million, or an average of $2 million a year. Now, this was unacceptable before, and it's definitely unacceptable today, not only because of the demands for availability that we have, but also, the fact that we're all having to look at our resources and our cost structure as well.
And when you look at some of the challenges that people have with disaster recovery today, it's clear why some are looking at the cloud as an option. And if you look at the top five issues that we have with cloud, right? Are around effective data transfer migration. Cost and budget, the budget of maintaining a secondary site just for DR. Your recovery orchestration, how simple it is. It's very complicated with a lot of the legacy DR tools that people have today.
So people look at cloud as an option to solve for that. You also have to train your personnel, right? Not just train them how to effectively perform a test, but to truly recover from a disaster, when it actually happens. And to be able to migrate those workloads. Those are the top challenges. So it's clear, why there's a parallel between folks understanding that they have to move towards a cloud strategy, when it comes to BC/DR. Now, that's not to say that everyone should move their BC/DR operations to the cloud.
And not all clouds are created equal. There's very different strategies that you can deploy depending on your needs and depending on your cost structure. So let's look at what an effective decision-making process is, when you're evaluating one, should my organization even move to the cloud? And should we move our BC/DR operations to the cloud? And what that process looks like, as Gartner describes very specific understanding of how to model this. One, you need to define the need. Understand, what are we trying to solve here?
What can the cloud promise that they can do for us? And what is our timeline? And a lot of timelines have been disrupted recently, so you also have to adjust for that. And understand what you need to derive from a cost model. Identify the areas of cost across the board, not just quantifiable, immediate, but also labor, and time and resources and knowledge. Build that cost model, validate the data, and then modify as needed. And then you can compare with all the tools available, at least within IaaS solutions around public cloud.
Now, when you're actually identifying your cost areas, what do they actually look like? Well, you always have facility, your IT administration costs, your hardware costs, your actual backup DR solution costs, and then the software as well. And there's a lot of underlying secondary costs associated with this, but you also have to make sure that you look at the cost areas specific to your DR strategy, meaning the hardware or the appliances that you have, to be able to maintain an on-premise DR strategy, and the cost of that remote site as well, not just your single on-premises site.
Now, based on an assessment of our customers and trying to understand who are the prime targets, what is the the prime profile of an organization that is ready and can benefit from moving the clouds? Well, we consider some of these the major driving factors. You have a continued data growth and sprawl. You're trying to move away from capital costs, more than operational OPEX model. You still have a digital initiative that involves cloud, so this is an easy way to transition towards that.
You need to either meet your current or exceed your current SLAs and your uptime SLAs, specifically RTOs and RPOs. You still have a limited budget, so means you have to be smart with your budget and make sure that you're allocating resources accordingly, but those resources also extend past budget, right? It's around your time and your labor as well. Now, we're going to take a look at a few of the options that we have now, or that your organization has now and take a look at, you know, what are the pros, what are the cons and what is the ideal profile of a business who's looking at public cloud, at VMware on public cloud, or VMware as a service, and disaster recovery as a service as well.
So let's take a look into IaaS or public cloud Infrastructure as a Service, right? Think of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform. These have been organizations that have continued maturing, that have continued to deliver really robust offerings for organizations, of companies of any size, really. So when you think of public cloud, right? Just from business benefit perspective, what is the public cloud or what does IaaS offer? Well, the most important thing, it's a reduction in your capital costs, you have to build out a new site, it's obviously much cheaper to scale with the cloud.
And you're you're paying as you go. And you're removing not only the cost of maintenance, but the actual labor associated with maintenance as well, and the reduction in administrative costs. So at any time, if you need to scale resources as well, you can do so much easier with a public cloud. And from a technical perspective, just think of it from a BC/DR, a backup perspective, just having another site, on a cloud site, on a different format, that meets your 3-2-1 rule needs as well.
And you have much higher reliability, than an on-premise strategy. You have a vast network of servers, insuring against any type of failure. So you have a higher margin of error to work with. And you have near unlimited scalability. You have on-demand resources for you to meet your business needs. And again, no maintenance done on your hand. So that's a lot less money, a lot less labor spent on maintaining a secondary site. So when you think about an organization, right?
When you think about your organization, it makes sense to move to IaaS. Specifically we're talking about BC/DR, it makes sense to move BC/DR, is scalability and flexibility is a priority, your business is growing, your needs are changing, and you need more resources, then it makes sense for you to move towards IaaS for your BC/DR operations. You're looking for a pay-as-you-go model, and maybe just not looking for it, but you're comfortable with it as well. But you're also thinking beyond BC/DR and understanding, you know, when it comes to your enterprise application management, your DevOps, some of the more other digital initiatives that you may have, public cloud offers a lot of resources that you can plug and play and use, and that spans across all IaaS offerings.
But you also already have a mature BC/DR practice, this means you have a DR strategy, you have the round books you're testing, your organization knows what it's doing, and is comfortable continuing to use public cloud as a DR site. Now, let's look at another option for somebody who does see the value of IaaS public cloud, but it's still very uncomfortable, within the current on-premise VMware environment. And that's what we refer to as VMware on public cloud or VMware as a service. And this is relatively new.
It's a very interesting approach. It's one that's utilized by Microsoft Azure, but also now by Google. Now, what do we mean by VMware as a service? Well, the fact is that now with these two offerings, you're able to migrate your native VMware workloads and into the public cloud but still operate within a VMware environment. So for example, what does this actually mean? Well, you're still getting the business benefits of the cloud. You're reducing your costs and focusing on a transition from CAPEX to an OPEX model.
You're still removing your maintenance and your administrative costs. Now, from a technical perspective, perhaps you are a large enterprise and you have invested a lot of time and resources, in mastering a VMware environment. Now, with VMware as a service with either Azure or Google, you don't need to re-architect your application. You can maintain your VMware policies and configurations and run native VMware workloads in public clouds. So you're still getting the value of the public cloud with the comfort of your current operations.
So it's kind of a best of both worlds scenarios for those organizations that maybe want to take a baby step into a public cloud and not fully dive deep yet, but still get that value and maintain current operations. So when you look at that organization model with the profile of somebody who will move towards public cloud, well, same thing as I asked, you still have scalability and flexibility as a priority, you're looking for a pay-as-you-go model but you'd have a very heavy focused VMware environment, meaning that your policies, your configurations, will take a lot of time to readjust, in order to go fully public cloud.
But you still want to be able to, perhaps include some of the services that public cloud offers around DevOps and big data, whether that's from Azure or Google, and you also have a mature DR practice. So your organization knows what it's doing. Now, we reviewed public cloud, and now we've reviewed what we call VMware as a service, or VMware on public cloud. And the third option is another viable option for organizations that perhaps have a less mature DR practice, or they're looking to offload a lot of the responsibilities and resources that's required to run a successful BC/DR operation, whether that's on premises public, or in the cloud.
And that's Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS. Now, this Gartner report, does provide some interesting assessments of why people are moving towards DRaaS. Well, some organizations till this day, surprisingly still don't have mature DR best Practices. So it's a lot easier to just offload to DRaaS. Some organizations did have a DR practice, but they were looking to improve their RTOs and RPOs. And then they found that it was much easier to go with DRaaS. And perhaps some organizations were limited in resource, they were limited in actual physical space, and they could not take the cost of building another second data center just for DR, right?
So this is what the analysts are seeing as the main reasons for people who are purchasing DRaaS. Now, what are the specific benefits of DRaaS? Well, it's still the same benefits of the cloud, with the pay-as-you-go model, but you're able to significantly lower your costs by not having to purchase any hardware or software and you're paying for the services that you're only using. But you're also, completely freeing up your employee resources, who exclusively focuses on BC/DR. Now, instead of, you know, maintaining a BC/DR site, and all the best practices that go in there, they can focus on building your business as well.
And from a technical perspective, DRaaS or service providers, give you a completely customizable solution, they perform risk assessments, and they give you very secure solutions as well, if you're in a highly secure environment. You have dedicated resources and even premium support, and the implementation is always a lot easier. And once again, no maintenance. Your service provider provides the maintenance. So, you know, if you're an organization that is still interested in the cloud, but is also interested, in effectively deploying a strong BC/DR solution, DRaaS makes a lot of sense.
So that's what we would consider the ideal profile of a DRaaS organization. Where you maybe have limited technical personnel and experience within BC/DR, but you have high security environments, you require dedicated resources, and you want that 24/7 support and the assurance that somebody is focused, on your disaster recovery preparedness and your ability to recover, when the scenario happens as well, if need be. Now, we've looked at all these options, we've understood that, you know, from a digital transformation perspective, it makes a lot more sense for organizations to start with a hybrid model, to move certain operations, certain business units to the cloud, and those workloads, see how it goes, unlock their benefits, and then slowly start transitioning more and more of the business to the cloud.
And we've looked at public cloud as an option, we've looked at VMware or VMware as a service on public cloud and disaster recovery as a service. We have a good working understanding of the business and technical benefits of all three. But what I want to review with you now, is regardless of what cloud strategy you choose, you still need an IT resilience solution, a platform around backup, around disaster recovery and around cloud mobility that allows you to move all that data, and to protect it regardless of the site that you choose.
And that's where the Zerto IT Resilience Platform comes in. Now, who are we? Well, at Zerto, we've been established since 2009. We've had over 8000 customers in 75 countries, over 1500 partners and very strong alliances with Microsoft, HPE, IBM, AWS, and more, and we also have a network of over 450 global managed service providers. And our vision, our vision is to enable an uninterrupted world for all technology users, consumers and businesses. And how do we do that? Well, we converge cloud mobility, disaster recovery and backup solutions into a single, simple, scalable IT resilience platform.
And when we mean single, simple and scalable, we truly mean that. It's fit for all environments. It is exactly one skew. So all of the benefits and the capabilities apply, when you use the IT resilience platform. No need to manage multiple licenses and product lines, within the same solution. Now, where does our secret sauce lie? Well, it lies in our replication and our ability to replicate data better than anybody else, giving you industry RPOs. And if you look at the traditional way that we do things, it's a simple deployment because we're software-only, your install could be within minutes.
And what we do differently, is we don't utilize snapshots. we use what we would call changed block tracking, and within changed block tracking, you have the ability to replicate checkpoints every five seconds, meaning that whenever you have a scenario that you have to roll back, you're not having to wait on the daily backups or your snapshots. And because it's replication and not snapshots, you also don't have, the overhead on your production environment as well. So what the environment looks like, it's a simple install, where you have a ZVM or we call the Zerto Virtual Manager that's easy to deploy.
And that's where you conduct all of your operations. And you can consider the VRA, or the virtual replication appliance, the replication engine. And it consists of a scalar architecture with a very small footprint. It has built-in compression and bandwidth throttling. And it gives you the ability to replicate to a journal, on the target site. And what do we mean by the journal? Well, at Zerto, we utilize journal-based recovery. So you already understand that we don't utilize snapshots, we're using replication.
Think of it as a stream of continuous checkpoints of your data, of every five seconds. And we have the mechanism that you can roll back that data essentially every five seconds. So let's use ransomware as a scenario or a use case. You know, let's say you've identified exactly the moment where your data was encrypted, and you were hit by ransomware. With Zerto, you can roll back simply five seconds before or even five seconds before that. So we deliver not only the best RPOs in the business, but also the best RTOs.
And within that journal, you can recover entire sites, you can recover applications, individual VMs, and either perform file level recovery. Now, this is the RPO piece. This means that, you know, we give you the granularity and ability to rewind for five seconds. But how long does that action take? We try to simplify that process and treat your applications as consistent units or cohesive logical units, so you also have a consistent recovery. And how do we do that? Well, we build what are called virtual protection groups.
Now a virtual protection group essentially, allows you to designate all of the VMs that your application consists of and create a VPG or a virtual protection group where you define your settings, you define the priorities and the RPOs. You define the target site. And then in the scenario that you have to recover, you can do it very quickly. Now, what does this actually look like? Well, let's think of a scenario with snapshots, right? Think of your legacy backup, your legacy DR solutions that offer snapshots.
What happens? Well, usually most organizations that have a snapshot model are doing daily backups. So you start your backup, right when not many people are working in the middle of the night, and that backup job takes quite some time to complete. Now, because you have multi VM applications, you are now taking snapshots of those VMs at different times, meaning that you have an inconsistent recovery, in the scenario that you have to recover, because you have to then do the math and find the common denominator of a snapshot or checkpoint that you can recover that application.
Now imagine having to do this, across all your multi VM applications. That leads to a completely inconsistent recovery, but also more importantly, hours and weeks spent, on recovering your applications after an incident. Now, how do we do it differently? Well, as we've discussed by treating them as logical units and looking at the entire application stack, you now can recover an application or VPG, virtual protection groups at a consistent checkpoint, giving you the ability to do that correctly. Now, that's the key to consistent recovery.
So we focus on, first of all, removing the amount of data loss that you have, but also giving you a lot more time and allowing you to seamlessly recover that data. Now, one of the very unique and differentiating factors of Zerto, is the fact that this isn't just a short-term solution, meaning that this journal, and in the historical days of Zerto, that journal was up to only 30 days. But within Zerto 7, we came out with the ability to extend that journal and unlock multiple storage tiers.
Meaning that you can point the journal to a secondary storage site. And now you have the ability to not only recover in the short-term from a DR perspective, but recover in the long-term from a backup perspective. So it's solving for backup use cases, without necessarily having all the consequences and detrimental capabilities of backup around snapshots, inconsistent recoveries. So if you think about Zerto special sauce, that's it. It's our replication, our journal, and our ability to use that journal anywhere. And when we talk about anywhere, that's what's most important, when you're trying to run a hybrid cloud architecture, or even a multi-cloud architecture.
And that's another differentiating factor. The fact that we can replicate your environment to public cloud. To a service provider, right? Think DRaaS and even to those VMware as a service solutions, within the public cloud. Now, you can have multiple clouds, you can simply stay on-premise. It doesn't matter with Zerto, and that's where its value lies, on the fact that you have full control of your data, of your protected data to protect an any target site that works for your business.
And that works exclusively with Microsoft Azure as well. Where you simply deploy what we call a Zerto cloud appliance, and ultimately, that's where it combines the Zerto Virtual Manager and the replication engine, and it utilizes blob storage as a method method to keep that data. So you know, we have a very strong working relationship with Microsoft, and always continue innovating integrated with Microsoft Azure as an eligible target site. And that also applies to AWS with S3 storage as well. 0, was an announcement around our support for VMware as a service, supported on Google.
Now, soon Google will be GA'ing and announcing, officially announcing and releasing, their VMware on Google Cloud Platform solution. And this will work exactly as it would, within another on-premise solution, and you still enjoy that Zerto replication and capabilities of retaining and moving your data wherever you want. So that's something very important that we've worked explicitly with each of your public cloud and service providers to make sure that the product works well, that it still retains its unique differentiators. And that applies to DRaaS as well.
So when you think of Zerto, think of the ultimate flexibility that you have in your environment. But let's say that you're thinking about using DRaaS because you're trying to build a maturity within your BC/DR program, but you see the value of the public cloud. Well with Zerto, we power most of service providers, or at least the leaders within service providers out there. And the proof is in when the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the Forrester wave. So you can see that most of these folks are Zerto.
Now, what does this actually look like in the long run? Well, with Zerto, let's say you are a very large enterprise, you have multiple co-lo facilities, and you need to utilize different cloud strategies, depending on what needs and what business problems you're trying to solve for. But because we're software-only, because we don't lock you into a vendor, you can utilize Zerto, within any type of infrastructure that you have to use, and that's the beauty of it. And it's not just the ability to replicate, to target and to move that data freely.
But it's also to be able to visualize it. And we have Zerto analytics and one of the really cool things about Zerto analytics, is that it's a SaaS based delivery, meaning that every few weeks we're coming out with new and interesting updates and capabilities that you have. Within one place, you can follow and track, all of your protected workloads with Zerto, regardless of where they live. And one of the more exciting things that we've done recently, and it's not just about giving you historical data, or your current statuses and performance, but also what you're going to need in the future.
And we do that with a tool within Zerto analytics, called the Zerto Resource Planner. And within the Zerto Resource Planner, you look at your current protected VMs, or the VMs you would like to protect with Zerto, and what your target site would like to be. And when you point it to a target site, the resource planner forecasts exactly what your WAN requirements are going to be, what your journal and recovery disk sizes are, from a storage perspective, your average IOPS and throughput and even VM level statistics.
So this removes a lot of the mystique, a lot of the gray area of, what's going to happen in my environment, when I have to move something to the public cloud? And that also applies to disaster recovery as a service users as well. And the interesting about thinking about this, it's not just for Zerto customers, this is also available for prospects. And one of the things I want to summarize here, from a product perspective is what this Zerto IT Resilience Platform is, what are the capabilities.
When you think about the use cases and what it does, based on continuous data protection, and what I would call the easy button or Zerto orchestration automation, you now have disaster recovery, think operational recovery, a lot of the local and file level recovery that you need to do, long-term retention, think back up, and that you can do that within hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and you also have tremendous amounts of operational services as well. This is what the Zerto IT Resilience Platform is. It's one platform for all of your virtual workloads, regardless of where they are, giving you full control over them.
Now, one of the things that I want to look into as well is, you know, we look at the cloud to solve for a lot of our resource and cost pain points. We also urge that you look at Zerto the same. Now you know how the technology works. and what makes it special. But let's look at some of the financial impact that Zerto has as well. And this is a customer case study by McKesson as well. And McKesson switched from using, you know, legacy backup and DR tools, to using the Zerto IT Resilience Platform, and they use Azure as a target site and IBM cloud as well.
They were protecting, you know, around 300 critical systems a year, and then with Zerto, they were able to protect over 750. And then they also ended up protecting 100% of their tier one apps. And from a cost and resource perspective, they were able to eliminate it by five x. Those are the same exact pain points that we're trying to solve, right? You want to be able to protect more of your critical data. You want to be able to reduce the cost and resources associated with doing that as well.
And it's not just a specific example. We have so many case studies where not only is our platform enabling their RTOs and RPOs to be much more successful, but it's also around resource allocation. Around replacing multiple point solutions, eliminating secondary sites, improving operational efficiency, the cost of downtime, and even merging data centers and having a lot of working with mergers and acquisitions as well. One of the things I urge you to do, is take a look at some of the research that we've provided and some of the evidence based on our total economic impact.
Because of our reduced cost of disaster recovery operations, a lot of our customers, are seeing tremendous value in what we're doing. And for those who were surveyed within this report, they saw a savings of over $204,000 a year. And that's not just within DR, but it's also across all IT resilience capabilities as well. A reduction in cost of DR tools around your backup software, around the migration tools that you need. By consolidating and converging all these onto the IT resilience platform, you see a tremendous economic benefit.
Now, I urge you to take a read, it's available online, and it's available for free to download. And it's called, The Total Economic Impact Of The Zerto TT Resilience Platform. And this study was conducted by the Forrester Group. Now, I know I want to answer a few of your questions as well, and I want to just finish with one last call to action. I specifically want because of the talk track that we have today, for you to check out our Azure TCO Calculator.
If you go to the link stated here, you can take a screenshot of this slide as well, and visit and just take a look at the estimate that we would provide you in the sense that if I want to move my BC/DR operations stuff, Azure, what is my total cost of ownership going to look like? And if you actually already are a Zerto customer and you're interested to see what your environment would look like in Azure, visit our hands-on labs. You don't need any infrastructure.
You can do it from your personal laptop as well. And if you're a prospect, you can actually sign up and get access to it as well. So you You would visit myZerto at this link, and get access to the hands-on labs. But ultimately, I want to thank everybody here for your time and to get a true understanding of what IT resilience platform is. (logo chiming)
