When critical data assets were once stored on one platform, disaster recovery was a fairly straightforward process. Now that workloads and massive amounts of data are stored on-premises and in multiple cloud environments, the process has become significantly more complex. More importantly, complicated infrastructures make it more challenging to rapidly troubleshoot problems and avoid system downtime.

IBM’s Resiliency Orchestration technology uses Zerto’s replication capability to provide a solution with the least downtime possible. “Think about multiple cloud forms; think about multiple clouds; think about multiple data movers and replicators,” said Daniel Witteveen (pictured), vice president of the resiliency services portfolio at IBM Corp. “We can orchestrate that entire recovery process using Zerto for the virtual environment, and the goal is to be as close to no outage as possible.”

Witteveen spoke with Paul Gillin (@pgillin), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the ZertoCon event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed Zerto’s role in providing recovery services and customer preferences in multicloud environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Need for cyber threat protection

Zerto’s replication technology is powering IBM’s disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS. Recovery has taken on added significance as enterprise systems increasingly come under attack from cybersecurity threats around the globe.

“Our clients are having a lot of discussions with us around changing the way we think about information technology resilience in light of a cyber-related incident,” Witteveen said. “The conversation has shifted to true business resilience.”

That business resilience is being influenced by scale as data flows and storage volumes increase. IBM rarely sees customers that are single cloud-oriented, according to Witteveen. Instead, clients want the flexibility to find and protect data in multiple cloud and on-prem environments.

“When you have a high change rate and a lot of storage volume, your decision will become where to recover and how to access data,” Witteveen said. “Long term, it will ultimately sit in the cloud, but there is still a massive amount of storage, and customers prefer a massive amount of that to be on-prem.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of ZertoCon. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for ZertoCon 2018. Neither Zerto Ltd, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE