Chris Rogers, Senior Technology Evangelist at Zerto, a HPE company
A robust cybersecurity posture is essential for ensuring the resilience of operational infrastructure, and the safety of confidential data and intellectual property.
Computing's Security Excellence Awards recognise and celebrate the best in the cybersecurity innovation which helps businesses and infrastructure providers to keep the show on the road when the inevitable breach occurs.
Winners will be announced at a live ceremony on 2nd May in central London,
Zerto is a finalist in two categories - Backup, Recovery and DLP and also Security Innovation of the Year. In advance of the awards, we caught up with Chris Rogers, Senior Technology Evangelist at Zerto.
Chris has 11 years of experience as an IT professional, focusing on data centre virtualization and Data Protection. In his previous role, Chris was a Cloud Architect within the MSP Team.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers. What makes you different from other companies?
Chris Rogers: Zerto empowers customers to run an always-on business by simplifying the protection, recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Our cloud data management and protection solution eliminates the risks and complexity of modernisation and cloud adoption across private, public, and hybrid deployments. We're trusted by over 9,500 customers globally and are powering offerings for Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and more than 350 managed service providers.
What differentiates us from our competitors is our laser focus on our key three areas: disaster recovery, ransomware resilience and multi-cloud mobility. We also provide the lowest RPOS and RTOS to our customers thanks to our industry-leading Continuous Data Protection (CDP).
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
CR: Last May, we launched the new Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault which provides the ultimate layer of protection and allows for clean copy recovery from an air-gapped solution if a replication target is also breached. The vault has three core pillars: replicate and detect, isolate and lock, and test and recover. Together with the vault's zero trust architecture, these pillars enable rapid air-gapped recovery in a highly secure environment.
The launch immediately hit the ground running, we have an amazing pipeline in the works, and the feedback we've received from customers has been great. It's definitely something that we've been very excited about as a team this year and it's been a privilege to watch the project get off the ground with so much success.
Why are events like the Security Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
CR: In an industry like cybersecurity, where there is so much noise to break through, it's important to have events where best in breed technologies can be showcased and recognised. It's vital for businesses to have access to the best technology to protect their data in the ever-evolving threat landscape and awards like Computing's Security Excellence Awards provide the tools for organisations to be able to identify industry-leading technology.
What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far and how have you overcome them?
CR: The greatest challenge we're currently facing in 2024 is changing perceptions around cybersecurity. For example, when it comes to vaulting and data protection, there is still a lot of uncertainty about how these should be used for cyber resilience. Vaulting in particular often raises numerous questions about what types of data should be vaulted, the level of protection required, how it can be integrated with existing cybersecurity frameworks etc.
This is why at Zerto we seek to not only provide industry-leading technologies but we also work closely with our customers to enhance their education, awareness, and guidance within the industry and change opinions in a positive way!
What do you see as the main opportunities for the IT industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?
CR: AI has certainly emerged as the primary opportunity for the IT industry to utilise this year. The new technology has changed the way organisations and threat actors interact with every aspect of the IT world and provides significant opportunities for innovation and advancement.
In the next few years, it'll be exciting to be able to capitalise on so many of the capabilities AI offers, enhance data security, streamline IT operations, and deliver exceptional value to our customers.
The Computing Security Excellence Awards take place on 2nd May. This event is now sold out. Please click here to see the finalists.
