Zerto: Ransomware Accelerating MSP Demand for DRaaS

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO, LAS VEGAS — Zerto disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) presents lucrative opportunities for MSPs as ransomware attacks continue escalating.

That’s according to Eric Barnhart (pictured above), Zerto’s vice president of worldwide cloud and channel sales. He gave an MSP Summit keynote on driving DRaaS growth with ransomware recovery with Zerto.

“DRaaS offerings from MSPs are often the foot in the door to even very large enterprise accounts where our partners can then deliver a whole menu of services inside that account,” he said. “The end result is the DRaaS market is growing exponentially over the next five years.”

Customers want to get to the cloud faster, Barnhart said. They also know running a successful digital business means they can’t tolerate disruptions or downtime of any kind.

“And then finally, addressing board-level and C-level concerns about ransomware is a top priority, particularly in the context of the previous two priorities,” he said.

Staggering Attack Levels Coming

By 2031, there will be a ransomware attack every two seconds, and the annual cost of recovery at that point will be $265 billion, a “huge cost for disruption,” Barnhart said, citing Cybersecurity Ventures research.

“But the cost of recovery is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “The average downtime as a result of a ransomware attack is now 21 days, not to mention the cost of severe reputational damage because these are very public events. IDC tells us that the cost of downtime as a result of a ransomware attack is as much as $250,000 an hour. As a result, ransomware is driving and accelerating adoption of DRaaS from our MSPs.”

Zerto “pioneered” this market and these offerings, Barnhart said. It’s been in this business for over a decade and has a multi-tenancy platform designed specifically for MSPs.

“That market today is just about $5 billion, but by 2027 it will be nearly $40 billion,” he said. “It’s growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42%. There’s significant opportunity.”

Zerto protects, recovers and moves critical workloads, applications and their associated data across on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments, Barnhart said.

Success Prompted HPE Acquisition

“I’m proud to say these capabilities and our success in the past, and our people have really led us to the point where Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired us late last year,” Barnhart said. “Today we have over 9,500 customers leveraging Zerto for their disaster recovery and management of their hybrid environments. But that number does not include the multiple thousands of customers who are consumer Zerto as a true as-a-service motion through our MSPs.”

As a DRaaS partner, Zerto allows MSPs to offer the fastest recovery in the business, and services based on the fastest recovery, he said.