Zert0 – BC/DR for financial companies
In financial services, disaster recovery is critical to ensure continuity of operations and minimal impact of any potential accident. Without a full BC/DR, disaster decisions can affect everything from the ability of employees to perform their job duties to the value of an organization’s stock. Because financial services and applications tend to increase the value of data and transactions, the BC/DR requirements to protect them tend to be:
- Minimal data loss with low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
- Minimal downtime and outages with low Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)
- No degradation in the performance of production databases, applications, and transactions
- Protection against crashes and logical failures
- Multi-VM Consistency for Large-Scale Enterprise Applications
- Application Compatibility
Data loss prevention is often perceived as the most important requirement when protecting financial applications and data, but a common misconception is that only solutions based on synchronized storage provide zero data loss. This is technically incorrect, as data running in memory can always be lost in the event of a failure in the data center and disk replication leaves only zero seconds of RPO when written to disk. Only application consistency ensures that there is no data loss at the point in time when data is frozen, making applications consistent at the time critical data is recovered for financial operations and applications.
How Zerto Protects Financial Applications
Zerto Virtual Replication continuously copies only changes to protected virtual machines (VMs), creating Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) within seconds to minimize data loss. One-click testing and one-click downtime automation are also minimized by generating allowable downtime (RTO) in minutes.
Zerto Virtual Replication does not affect performance by not using snapshots to protect data because replication occurs continuously using log-based protection. This ensures that financial applications are protected from all kinds of failures: from data center outages, database corruption or faulty application updates, allowing you to recover thousands of points in time, seconds before a logical failure occurs, as well as minimize data loss.
Zerto Virtual Replication uses Virtual Protection Group (VPG) technology to recover financial applications that consist of multiple virtual machines at a single point in time, enabling sequential recovery. Without a VPG, the recovery of financial applications can be disrupted, as each virtual machine can be recovered at various points in time, potentially referencing financial data that is not present in all applications and virtual machines being recovered.
Zerto Offsite Backup is an optional feature of Zerto Virtual Replication that takes information that is already replicated to the target site and uses it to create a backup. Removing backup operations from a production environment reduces the load on the production environment caused by frequent snapshot backups and other backup methodologies.
Finally, application connectivity is supported by virtual machines on both Windows and Linux, using the Zerto VSS agent for Windows databases and Microsoft SQL databases, or scripts for Linux and Oracle databases to ensure that disasters and consistent application points are available for recovery operations. Application consistency can be scheduled with any periodicity defined in such a way that the impact of production can be minimized and management allows the recovery of accidents and time points
Application consistency
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Zerto Virtual Replication is used globally to protect financial services environments and financial applications with industry-leading disaster recovery and remote backups. Zerto works with organizations ranging from small businesses to large financial institutions processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per hour.