Disaster recovery has become a “when” not “if” scenario. The past few years have seen cyberattack statistics shoot through the roof, and while disruptions caused by natural disasters are still a cause for concern, it’s the threat of a ransomware attack that makes security officers stress.

Looking to lighten ransomware anxiety by simplifying DR, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, acquired cloud data management and protection company Zerto Inc. for $374 million in July of this year. But what makes Zerto special?

“Remember the DR test where it was a weekend? It was an event for the entire IT organization. What we’ve changed is that is in a click of a button,” said Deepak Verma (pictured, left), vice president of product at Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Verma and Omer Asad (pictured, right), senior VP and general manager of data management SaaS, infrastructure and HCI at Nimble Storage, a Hewlett Packard Enterprises company, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. They discussed how HPE’s acquisition of Zerto is bringing one-click disaster recovery to HPE’s GreenLake platform. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

What does Zerto bring to the HPE family? 

Asad: The acquisition of Zerto expands HPE’s GreenLake offerings into the data protection-as-a-service and ransomware protection-as-a-service capabilities. At the same time, it accelerates the transformation that the HPE storage business is going through as it becomes a cloud native business, enabling the HPE sales teams to expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection-as-a-service and ransomware protection-as-a-service with the best-in-class technologies from a protection side, as well as from a ransomware recovery side.

The basics of platform independence are what drew HPE technologists in. We have the high-end platform with the HPE Alletra 9000, we have the Alletra 6000 as the mid-range platform, then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What Zerto does is it universally applies to all those technologies. You can pair them up with our compute offerings to offer a full-stack, and now the stack is disaster recovery capable natively with the integration of Zerto.

Can you give us some use cases for how Zerto is helping customers deal with ransomware vulnerabilities?

Verma: First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So we’re built on a CDP platform, which means extremely low [recovery time objectives] and [recovery point objectives] for recovery. I’ll give you an example: United Airlines has an application that costs them a million dollars for every hour that they’re down. If they used traditional approaches, that would be a lot of loss. With Zerto, we have that down to seconds of loss in case the application goes down. So, CDP is core and fundamental to our platform.

The second critical use case for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult, simple. An example is HCA Healthcare, which consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform at Zerto and saved about $10 million a year.

The third critical use case for us has emerged as the environment and threat landscape has evolved around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to has become critical for us and our customers. An example is Kingston Technology. Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure, but it would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 or so [virtual machines]. With Zerto technology, they could get all their thousand VMs up in Azure instantaneously.

So, these are the three use cases that we’ve built the company and the technology on.

Asad: Investing in a DR data center which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen is a very expensive insurance policy. So, Zerto, through its native capabilities, allows customers to use the public cloud as a DR target and as a service. It just takes care of all the format conversions and the recoveries, and all that is completely automated inside the platform.

What should we expect in the near future from HPE and Zerto?

Asad: Zerto is the true data management service that is going to come up on HPE’s Data Services Cloud Console as part of the GreenLake services agenda that HPE has in the customer’s environment. Then you’re going to see compliance-as-a-service, you’re going to see data protection as-a-service and you’re going to see disaster recovery-as-a-service. But the beautiful thing about it is that you have choice with simplicity.

As these services get loaded up on Data Services Cloud Console, all our customers instantly get it. There’s nothing to install. There’s nothing to troubleshoot. There’s nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console. And from there, it’s just a flip of a button. Or, another way to look at it is you can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration — all of that just takes control from the Data Services Cloud Console.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the An HPE GreenLake Announcement event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE