US Signal Reveals New Features for DRaaS with Zerto Offering

US Signal announced that it has implemented new developments to its Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) with Zerto offering. These new enhancements include self-management, enterprise license mobility, multi-cloud replication, and stretch layer 2 failover. These updates will allow customers to benefit from utilizing options for additional protection against common IT issues.

The demand for disaster recovery (DR) solutions continues to rapidly increase due to its ability to help businesses maintain maximum availability of their critical applications- even in the face of IT outages, advanced cyberthreats like ransomware, and natural disasters. In July 2019 alone, cybercriminals used ransomware to lock up essential data at organizations in New Mexico, Nevada, Connecticut, Louisiana and more. The updated offering from US Signal and Zerto presents a first-class disaster recovery solution that ensures customers have availability when a disaster strikes.

“With the new enhancements for our DRaaS with Zerto offering, we are giving our customers the tools they need to make sure their critical IT workloads are always available,” said David McClure, product development manager at US Signal. “Today’s organizations rely on the availability of their IT assets more than ever, and we are excited to be a strategic partner that helps them achieve maximum up time with minimum data loss, no matter what disaster they are facing.”

The four new enhancements include several new benefits that make this possible, including:

Self-Managed DRaaS 
US Signal’s Disaster Recovery with Zerto now enables companies to manage and control their DR solution while taking advantage of the strength and security of the US Signal cloud. This allows them to achieve geo-diversity, minimize human error, avoid issues from patching and keep malicious threats like ransomware separate from their production environments.

They can also take advantage of US Signal’s reliable infrastructure and networking while having the flexibility to build their own virtual protection groups (VPGs) to turn replication on or off, test different failover scenarios, or to fail over whenever necessary. In addition, customers can fail over isolated VPGs or their entire environment using a web-accessible self-service portal in case of a full-site failure that leaves the central management interface unavailable.

Enterprise License Mobility 
US Signal Disaster Recovery with Zerto now supports customers who already have purchased a perpetual Zerto IT Resilience Platform^TM: Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE) license along with maintenance and support from Zerto. Leveraging an existing license results in lower fees, and customers can still elect to have their service managed by US Signal or can manage it themselves.

Multi-cloud Replication 
With US Signal’s multi-cloud replication option, customers can leverage having secondary copies of their production environments in multiple virtual data centers for added protection. This feature enables protection for different failure domains– locally for individual machine restores and remotely for full site protection. It also empowers customers to follow best practices with a 3-2-1 backup and disaster recovery plan by creating local copies, for faster restores, while still having an off-site copy for added protection. Multi-cloud replication is also great for customers going through digital transformation, as it provides a way to migrate workloads into the US Signal cloud.

Stretch Layer 2 
Stretch layer 2 is a product extension with the ability to stretch a virtual local area network (VLAN) to allow virtual machines to talk over the same broadcast domain while in different physical locations. Layer 2 connectivity can be stretched over a layer 3 connection. This allows customers to fail over VPGs without the need to reconfigure IP addresses.