Zerto vs Cohesity: Data Protection Solutions

Data is your company’s lifeblood, and it’s constantly at risk of being stolen, taken for ransom, or permanently lost. Many factors can compromise your data — cybersecurity threats, natural disasters, hardware failures, and human error to name but a few. Although most of these factors are out of your control, you can still make sure your data is protected against them.

Schedule Your Free Cloud Backup Consultation

• For 83% of companies, a data breach is a foregone conclusion — it’s not a case of if, but when.¹
• The average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million.²

When you consider these statistics, you can see that ensuring that your data protection solution is up to par should not be negotiable. Many service providers promise to protect your data and guarantee zero data loss in the event of a disruption, but the harsh reality is that you’ll only learn how protected your data is when you’re in a disaster recovery situation. The challenge is finding a data protection solution that offers maximum protection, can deliver on this undertaking, and won’t break the bank. Choosing the right technology partner to protect your data boils down to understanding your backup and disaster recovery options and rigorously vetting the service provider entrusted with your data. Choosing the right data protection solution typically comes down to three factors:

• How easy it is to use.
• The level of data protection offered.
• The agility of the solution.

This article delves into two top-of-the-line data protection solutions providers — Zerto and Cohesity — and puts them head to head so that you can make the best choice for your business.

Continuous data protection

Data loss and downtime affect businesses’ bottom lines and can harm their reputations. The average cost of downtime is estimated at $1,410 per minute.³ In addition, legacy disaster recovery solutions rely on snapshots that can prolong downtime and when your data is lost, it’s gone forever.

Zerto’s continuous data protection (CDP)

Zerto backup solves data protection challenges with a granular recovery solution that allows businesses to capture and track data changes, automatically saving and writing every version of the data either locally or at a target repository. Zerto’s data protection services are designed to keep your data safe and help you recover from disruptions such as cyber-attacks, human errors, power outages, natural disasters and more. A Zerto solution provides the lowest recovery point objectives (RPOs) and fastest recovery time objectives (RTOs) while its virtual replication journal documents the state of your infrastructure every few seconds. If there’s a disruption, your data stays protected while you recover to any point in time, down to the seconds. Zerto’s data protection advantages include:

• Protect and recover: Consistently protect and recover multi-VM application stacks across all points in time.
• Data replication: Data is continually replicated to storage as it’s written using change-block tracking.
• Storage savings: Zerto’s CDP uses no extra space in the source storage. Because there are no snapshots, space is freed up, resulting in substantial storage savings. 
• Ransomware recovery: In the event of ransomware or a cyber-attack, CDP recovers data to the second, greatly minimising any business impact.

Cohesity’s DataProtect

Cohesity DataProtect is a high-performance software-defined backup and recovery solution that offers comprehensive policy-based protection for both traditional and modern data sources. As an industry leader in space-efficiency, Cohesity sits on a multi-cloud data platform and converges multiple-point products into a single software that can be deployed on-premises or as-a-service. DataProtect offers:

• Hyperscale simplicity with broad application support:  DataProtect offers holistic enterprise-class protection across a wide range of sources. It streamlines data protection by eliminating old backup silos and controlling backup and recovery infrastructure through an easy-to-use UI. 

• Lightning fast recovery: With near-zero RPOs and almost instant RTOs, DataProtect meets business service-level agreements (SLAs) with ease.

• Freedom from Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS): Choosing an OpEx spend model eliminates the need for on-premises hardware and allows you to easily configure backups so that you’re ready to protect your mission-critical data and applications within minutes.

Disaster recovery

In an age where most businesses are almost exclusively reliant on data and computers, an effective disaster recovery plan is not negotiable. Unplanned downtime caused by disruptive events can have a devastating impact on your business. Research shows that 40%-60% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster.⁴ Some common types of disasters include natural disasters, human-made disasters, technological failures and malicious attacks. A robust disaster recovery solution can help your business become more resilient and resume operations with minimum downtime and data loss.

Zerto — Disaster recovery you can trust

Zerto’s CDP-based disaster recovery is a cost-effective solution that helps businesses recover from ransomware, outages and more. With near-zero RPOs and lightning-fast RTOs, you can substantially reduce downtime and limit data loss. Zerto’s single-solution disaster recovery capabilities include:

• Always-on data replication: Create thousands of recovery points to deliver the best RTOs and RPOs. 
• Journal-based recovery: Every change made is automatically written into a journal, allowing you to point to a time right before an incident.  
• Application-centric recovery: Protect multi-VM applications as one cohesive unit to ensure simple, consistent recovery.
• Built-in orchestration and automation: Reduce time, resources, and the costs of performing failovers, fail backs, and testing.

Cohesity — SiteContinuity

Being prepared can mean the difference between catastrophe and recovering your data if disaster strikes. Even so, only three out of ten organisations surveyed indicated that they are prepared for a site failure or disaster.⁵ Relying on a combination of legacy products contributes to this low confidence in disaster recovery strategies. Legacy products only focus on specific tiers and meeting specific service levels. Today’s apps have various service levels and disaster recovery is needed across various tiers, both on-prem and in public cloud environments. Cohesity’s disaster recovery solution has exceptional benefits:

• Avoid downtime and data loss: Mitigate risk to your business with automated failover and failback and non-disruptive testing at scale.

• Quick and flexible recovery: Cohesity’s unified SiteContinuity policy framework gives you the flexibility to protect, detect and restore your business-critical data and apps to any recovery point in time. 

• Business continuity: Business disruptions can be unpredictable, so your disaster recovery solution should always be ready for worst case scenario. Cohesity’s SiteContinuity delivers always-on accessibility with no added IT silos, complexities or costs. It also improves business continuity while accelerating business resiliency. 

• Multi-factor authentication and encryption: AES-256 encryption and FIPS certification keep your data safe no matter what.

Agility

Data protection cannot remain static — it has to be scalable and able to adapt to growing business needs. Both Zerto and Cohesity offer exceptional agility. Zerto’s data management and protection solutions can protect your data to, from and between clouds, no matter the cloud deployment. Their scalable architecture can protect petabytes of data and a few thousand VMs while converting workloads to run seamlessly on different native environments. Zerto also uses native services such as:

• Scale sets.
• Queues.
• Cloud storage services that maximise availability and minimise data loss.

Cohesity provides agile development and testing for hybrid cloud, ensuring your business can tackle mass data fragmentation. With Cohesity you get: 

• Agility and cyber resilience.
• Differentiated service offerings. 
• Pay-per-capacity and pay-per-use models.

Putting them to the test

The true test of a data protection solution is its use cases. Zerto proves itself in its security and compliance, withstanding any ransomware attacks through CDP and a move away from snapshots. It also offers compliance reporting and testing to ensure you’re all set by the time you go live. Ultimately, Zerto combines everything you need to protect your infrastructure in a single, simple, and scalable cloud data management and protection solution. Cohesity has been relied on to protect data for 4 out of 10 Fortune 500 companies. It has also supported hospitality, healthcare, insurance and public-sector organisations across the United States. With the industry’s first multi-cloud data management platform, Cohesity offers a modern approach to data management and cyber resilience.

Choosing the right solution for your business

Both Zerto and Cohesity’s software solutions are easy to use and extremely reliable, making both great business choices. This can make choosing the optimal solution for your business quite challenging.  That’s where Nexstor comes in: we’re committed to developing and securing bespoke solutions for organisations. We’ll evaluate your organisation and help select the right data protection infrastructure for you, whether that’s Zerto or Cohesity. We’ll also ensure you have access to specialised cloud-data infrastructure solutions, managed services and on-demand IT support through our in-house team. Get in touch with Nexstor to take the first step towards better data protection today. 

---

¹ Cost of a data breach 2022. ² Cost of a data breach 2022. ³ 2022 Data Protection Trends Report. ⁴ 23 Disaster Recovery Statistics You Should Know. ⁵ Your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategy Needs a Rethink.