The Ultimate Guide to Disaster Recovery with HPE Greenlake and Zerto: Best Practices and Strategies

An accelerated path towards disaster recovery is the key to ensuring business continuity in case of unforeseen calamities. The recent surge in ransomware attacks can severely compromise your sensitive business and customer data, often disrupting operations. Though disaster recovery is an integral aspect that many companies have in place, the need of the hour is to continuously improvise existing systems prone to the latest vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. HPE has a solution in its Greenlake Disaster Recovery suite in combination with Zerto to ensure complete security of your physical, on-cloud, edge, or hybrid operating model.

The Shift to a Software-as-a-Service Disaster Recovery Model

In-house teams entirely administer conventional Disaster Recovery (DR) models. With data distribution across on-prem physical locations, data centers, cloud, and in a hybrid model, DR becomes too diffuse to have a unified solution with a consolidated tracking mechanism. Within this model, businesses adopt DR software that attunes to their requirements, but it has its share of drawbacks regarding high licensing and infrastructure costs. The challenge of incorporating the latest security measures to counter emerging threats is also a limitation that needs consideration.

The use of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) puts the entire security posture in the hands of external service providers who might be unable to align with a diffuse storage model that many organizations have in place. The choice of an on-cloud or hybrid DR model does away with cost overheads related to physical infrastructure and gives the option of adopting a desired DR software. However, such models, though elastic and cost-effective, have drawbacks in data storage and administration.

With the above limitations, a Software-as-a-Service model (DR) model gains prominence as software transmissions occur across the internet. It gives administrators greater control of their DR management systems while doing away with the cumbersome process of maintaining DR software. Such are best suited for enterprises operating in diverse global locations with complex DR deployments. Businesses stand to benefit from automatic patches and upgrades, along with an additional layer of security with lower upfront costs.

Disaster Recovery with HPE Greenlake and Zerto

HPE Greenlake is a leading edge-to-cloud platform that provides a wide range of services and solutions for a hybrid cloud platform. With AI-powered capabilities, it is a unified suite that enables greater visibility, protection, and monitoring of your infrastructure, both on-prem and on the cloud. HPE Greenlake Disaster Recovery combines the native DR capabilities with Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) processes over a flexible Software-as-a-Service subscription model.

What You Gain with HPE Greenlake and Zerto’s SaaS Disaster Recovery Capabilities:

Granular Visibility: HPE Greenlake offers granular visibility across multi-site deployments in a unified view, enabling easy administration and faster DR.

Real-time Monitoring:The suite enables real-time monitoring and reporting within pre-defined SLAs. You stand to gain from a DR exercise within minutes, accessible anytime and anywhere. This ensures seamless business continuity with minimal downtime.

Continuous Data Protection: HPE Greenlake comes with an always-on and platform-agnostic data replication model and journaling, which does not impact your production cycle and does away with the need for scheduling and snapshots. Get a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in minutes, enabling you to roll back your data and applications to a specific time before a disaster occurs. Move towards a Continuous Data Protection (CDP) capability by the built-in integration with Zerto.

Automated Management: Achieve non-disruptive deployment, protection, and testing of your entire systems with built-in automation and orchestration capabilities.

Flexible Architecture: HPE Greenlake DR suite is platform, hardware, and storage agnostic. This gives much-needed flexibility in integrating your existing technology stack with the scope for modernization and migration.

Automated Updates and Patches: Get the benefit of automatic updates and security patches without manual intervention, making your DR capabilities stay up to date.

App-centric Recovery Model: Using HPE Greenlake powered by integration with Zerto, you can automatically connect to sites and VMs requiring protection. The suite facilitates the addition of VMs to protection groups for an App-centric recovery model.

Best Practices for a Resilient Disaster Recovery Strategy

1. Identify the extent to which cloud service providers offer security and the point where your responsibility comes into the picture.
2. Assess your supply chain activities for potential loopholes vulnerable to third-party attacks.
3. Monitor user behavior analytics to understand deviations from regular patterns, which can be the starting point of a malicious attack.
4. Invest in a robust cybersecurity program across your organization and make your users aware of the individual access privileges and the working of the security posture. This helps in easy adaptability across the length and breadth of your organization.
5. Ensure proper encryption and tokenization processes for your data, till it reaches the end stage.
6. Adopt a Zero Trust model for increased resilience and better protection of your data, infrastructure, and applications.
7. Implement a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) network architecture that helps you leverage VPN and SD-LAN capabilities with cloud-native security features.
8. Factor in the device-level risks associated with IoT and BYOD (Bring your own Device), and implement MDM and MAM processes to secure mobile devices.
9. Use a metric-based model to evaluate the effectiveness of your security controls and enhance capabilities that need attention. Get insights on recent security vulnerabilities globally and refine your existing strategies. The SaaS-based HPR Greenlake automatically takes care of updating your current security posture and disaster recovery processes.
10. Define, monitor, and improvise security goals that your organization requires for chartering efficient security and DR management processes.

When used in conjunction with HPE Greenlake and Zerto, the above strategies and best practices help you build and maintain a robust and reliable security posture, increasing resilience and decreasing downtime and data loss in case of unforeseen disasters. For any clarifications on how you can benefit by implementing HPE Greenlake integrated with Zerto, contact us, and our security experts will be glad to help.