Chief information officers in information technology companies have pressure to not only push products to market, but also lead their customers on a sure and steady compliance path toward a successful digital transformation.

“… IT is becoming [an increasingly] critical part of the business,” said Avi Raichel (pictured), chief information officer of Zerto Ltd, which provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software for virtualized infrastructure and cloud environments. “Once so much relies on IT, IT resilience becomes a significant issue. … Let’s say you’re a healthcare provider, and now a lot of your operations are digitalized. Can you really afford the down time?”

Raichel spoke with Paul Gillin (@pgillin), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the ZertoCon event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how companies are accelerating IT resilience and transforming IT operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Not your average workload

Some workloads are better optimized for a specific cloud than others, and there are workloads that should not even go into the cloud, according to Raichel. “By natural evolvement, you will find yourself with several clouds. … Not everything is cloud ready, and sometimes you should leave some workloads on-premise or in a [co-location] data center. That creates this hybrid reality,” he said.

Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform is able to dynamically shift between cloud providers, Raichel explained. It allows for continuous data protection, ensuring data infrastructure is resilient. Raichel further pointed to the workload mobility feature as part of its success. Last month, the company mobilized 50 workloads from its on-prem data center to its co-location data center.

“It was just a few hours of work with the Zerto product, without any downtime, and that was fantastic,” he said.

On the topic of data privacy, the data protection regulations unleashed in Europe (for any business with European operations) on May 25 have mustered up alertness with compliance. Zerto’s legal department has been working for months to ensure the company fully complies with the General Data Protection Regulation.

“We’re making an honest effort. This is not something organizations should ignore,” Raichel said.

So what’s the roadmap for CIOs in the year ahead? CIOs will be dealing with the digital transformation head on with the customer experience, the journey to the cloud, cybersecurity, strategic risks, machine learning, “internet of things,” security protocols, and leveraging data assets, according to Raichel.

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