March 27, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode of Thriving in Ambiguity, I sit down with Mike Shelborn from HPE’s Zerto team to talk about how state and local government agencies can radically rethink disaster recovery and ransomware resilience.
We break down:
✅ Why traditional backup isn’t cutting it anymore
✅ What Continuous Data Protection (CDP) actually means
✅ How Zerto helps agencies recover in minutes — not days
✅ Real-world examples from the public sector
✅ How Zerto fits into hybrid cloud and “Cloud Smart” strategies
If you’re an IT leader navigating legacy tech, tight budgets, or increasing cyber threats, this episode is a must-watch.
👉 Ready to explore Zerto for your agency? Reach out and let’s talk.
🔔 Subscribe for more conversations on public sector tech, leadership, and staying ahead in a world of constant change.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Steve Mancini (00:06):
Welcome back to Thriving In Ambiguity, the podcast where we break
down the complexities of technologyideally without losing our mind.
Today we're diving into one of themost critical and often overlooked
parts of state government.
It.
Disaster recovery and data protection.
And joining me today is Mike Shelburn,a leader HPE's Zerto business.
(00:28):
Mike, I really appreciateyou taking the time today.
Mike Shelburn (00:32):
Steve, it's an honor to be here.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Steve Mancini (00:35):
Let's, let's start from the top.
For the folks who might not befamiliar with Zerto, how does it
fit into the broader HPE portfolio?
Mike Shelburn (00:44):
Yeah, absolutely.
So Zerto was acquired by HewittPackard Enterprise or HPE in 2021.
We are the golden standard pertaining todisaster recovery, business continuity.
And as everyone knows HPE hasa growing and robust portfolio
around those types of solutions.
And, and Zerto really is that Mobilitygrants more resilience and DR and
(01:09):
business continuity layer to our company.
Steve Mancini (01:13):
Nice.
No, no.
That's great.
You've been with with Zerto a long time.
Mike Shelburn (01:17):
So after a 10 year career at CDWG, I'm on my second
year this April, here at HPE Zerto.
Steve Mancini (01:24):
Mike, as we're getting ready to kind of talk through some of
Zerto, I, I think it would be great ifyou gave the audience maybe a little
bit of an overview of, what Zerto isand maybe what it brings to the table
Mike Shelburn (01:36):
Absolutely Steve.
So Zerto, we are a, a softwaresolution devoted to business
continuity and disaster recovery.
So in essence, we're an iTsoftware resilience platform.
goal and mission around the globe isto provide our customers the smallest
amount of lost data, coupled with thefastest recovery times possible, bar
none the face of any type of disruption.
(01:59):
The scope of our software and my software, is that we support virtualized workloads
across on premise, hybrid cloud, andmulti-cloud environments, and we do that.
Agnostically will work with anycustomer's current hardware and
cloud stack as it stands today.
Steve Mancini (02:16):
Oh, that, that's really cool.
I mean, I think that brings a lotof value to customers who maybe you
know, don't necessarily want, ormaybe they've made an investment and,
and they have some equipment, andwhat you're saying basically is you
don't have to throw all that out.
Right.
Mike Shelburn (02:31):
No, sir. I mean for the past 20,25 years
zerto has appreciated with.
It the world changing, and what Imean by being an appreciative asset
is when we got our start in 2009, wewere devoted to specifically business
continuity and disaster recovery.
forward to the mid 2010s, right?
(02:54):
The ability to replicate into thecloud, of the cloud and back down on
premise, became available to our clients.
additionally, or most recently, inApril of 2023, as the world experienced
greater impacts of cyber attacks andransomware, Zerto now has the capability
at the block level of client data todetect anomalous encryption activities.
(03:16):
Furthermore, we'll narrow in on thatblast radius and give our clients the
visibility to a clean checkpoints rerecover safely in, in faces of in the face
of rather cyber crimes and cyber attack.
Steve Mancini (03:29):
One of the things I keep hearing about, and I, I think it'd be
good to elaborate on, is I keep hearingthis acronym, CDP, you know, and I,
I hear it, it's a game changer, but.
How does that relate to public sector?
And what is CDP.
Mike Shelburn (03:47):
Oh, great question.
CDP is our foundation right here at.
Continuous data protection or CDP Right.
Differs from, and I thinkit's, you know, I learned by
understanding a baseline, right?
So how we differ from traditionalbackups, which occurred 12 hours or
20, every 24 hours with our clients.
(04:08):
CDP and the Zerto Journal gives customersthe capability effectively make their
data streamable, think like a DVR.
So we have a real time journal.
We allow our customers to kind of rollback via replica checkpoints of their
data and resume operations and restoreproduction to the site of their choosing.
(04:31):
So it's essential, right, in myopinion, for ransomware response and
operational continuity today in 2025.
Steve Mancini (04:39):
Okay, nice.
So the DVR example is an interesting one.
So you're saying if I had some sort ofissue, could be ransomware, it could
be just something else, maybe one of myit, you know, staff members accidentally
deleted a folder they shouldn't have.
You're able to then kind ofpull that back, you know, how,
(05:01):
how, what's the timeframe?
Mike Shelburn (05:03):
Yeah, no.
Rewind 'em to cover.
So Zerto back in 20 2009 becamethe golden standard within disaster
recovery and business continuity.
For this very reason, we'regonna replicate workloads
every five to 15 seconds.
From site A to site B, and site Bcontains that Zerto journal where
effectively you'll have replicacopies stored on preexisting
(05:24):
hardware that the customer provides.
So no need to buy additionalhardware to support my, my software.
And effectively your databecomes streamable that journal.
So you'll have checkpoints or our RPO'srather, recovery point objectives.
Steve Mancini (05:40):
Mm-hmm.
Mike Shelburn (05:41):
Effectively five to 15 seconds apart.
Mileage varies, but that those arethe, the averages as it stands today.
Steve Mancini (05:48):
Oh, that's, that's, that's awesome.
I could see huge value in that.
Now you mentioned ransomware.
Let's, let's dig into that.
All right, so ransomware is everywherein, in state and local government.
It.
And, and a lot of the times when I'mhaving conversations, what I like to
say, it, it's not a matter of of whenor if it's, it's a matter of when.
(06:10):
You just spoke of Zerto's,journal based recovery.
But let, let's dig into that as faras how, how will that help agencies
get a better shot of recovering.
And, eliminate the need to potentiallyhave to pay those ransomware demands.
Mike Shelburn (06:27):
Oh, great.
Great
Great.
Good point, Steve.
So
we have
Steve Mancini (06:30):
we.
Mike Shelburn (06:30):
pending algorithms within our software today.
That in real time, we'll detectmalicious encryption events.
And furthermore, within that journalyou just spoke to or spoke of, rather
we'll identify where the maliciousencryption activity occurred to down
to the minute and second, we'll alsoidentify a clean checkpoint for our
customers to be able to then rollback and resume production recover.
(06:54):
So effectively we're gonna give you theability to rewind to a clean state prior
to that malicious encryption event.
recover in minutes without payingthe ransom, as opposed to, you know,
rehydrating from backups, right?
And, and really causing, youknow, monetary damages to rise.
But also that black eye, right,that organizational black eye in,
(07:17):
in reputational black eye will besmaller with Zerto, As you're able to
restore production, resume operationsmore effectively and quickly.
Steve Mancini (07:27):
Yeah, no, that, that's a great point.
And, and the other piecethat I really like to tell.
Customers as I'm having conversations,you know, look, at the end of the day
there is a cost and I'm gonna follow upwith, with a cost question down the road.
But look, there's, there's a cost to someof this and, and a lot of times, as I've
had conversations with CIOs and it's like,well, you know, we're on a tight budget.
(07:51):
How are I gonna afford it?
I said, look, at the end of the day.
Get it off of your desk,because when that, cyber event
happens, can you recover?
Because, you know, if, if you can't,then you are risking your job, you're
risking a lot of different things.
And so being able to have the confidenceto say, Hey, yes, I can recover and I
(08:16):
can recover quickly is super important.
And yes, there's a costassociated with that.
But I always say get it up the chain.
Make financial, make that choicethat says, Hey, we're not gonna
make this investment because.
Someone's gonna ask a question.
If you have that kind of ransomwareevent, and you're put in that, terrible
(08:37):
situation, and you don't want ever seeanyone in they're gonna start asking
questions, well, why weren't we prepared?
Why didn't you have the systems toput in place to be able to recover?
Why am I having now to pay this ransom?
And so, at the very least, youshould be able to say, well.
I put that on your desk.
We looked at Zerto.
(08:58):
It's an awesome solution, , youdidn't wanna fund it, so get it off.
Get it off your plate.
Mike Shelburn (09:04):
No, for sure.
And I think one, one thing I justread, Steve was very interesting to me.
So NIST right, is a, a framework andorganization that, you know, state,
local and education customers follow.
And they just published a reportand it was, it was very interesting.
And I wrote, wrote down some facts.
So in 2023 at the federalgovernment, layer $8 billion were
(09:28):
spent in preventative technologies,
the silences, the CrowdStrike of theworld, if you will, $450 million were
spent on recovery technologies across theboard at the federal government layer.
Fast forward to 2024.
The cost of preventative technologieswent up $1 billion, right.
(09:48):
To 9 billion in total.
But we saw a drastic spike with recoverytechnology expenditures from 450 million
to over, slightly over $2 billion.
So there's a, there's a paradigmshift occurring here, right.
And you said it before better than thanI, that it's not if, but when, and I
hate being a fear monger professionally.
Right.
(10:08):
And I'm not trying to dothat, think it's important to.
For myself and, you know, effectivelymy customers and your customers
to look in the mirror and askthemselves, are they prepared?
Because it truly is not if, but whenthese these malicious occurrences
happening more rapidly and they'rehappening to institutions and verticals
(10:31):
of government that are most exposed.
Back in 2020 4K, 12 institutions were thenumber one public institutions rather.
number one attacked vector withinAmerica today, so scary stuff.
Steve Mancini (10:45):
Well, it's funny because I, I think some people
think that, you know, these.
These hackers are just thesepeople in somebody's basement
in like a third world country.
And it's like, dude, no,these are are normal people.
It may be in, in Russia or youknow, some other country like.
(11:07):
Okay.
That, that piece may be true, butthese are people that come to work
every day as professionals andthey're sitting at a desk and their
job is to find, you know, and exploitpeople's data, like that's their job.
They don't, they don't see it aslike, I'm this, this, this bad person.
They're just doing their job.
Mike Shelburn (11:25):
They're just doing their job and there's, there's
sanctioned countries performingransomware as a service, right.
And there's a whole methodology and,and, you know, playbook if you will,
for those, those folks to, causea lot of headaches and do a lot
Steve Mancini (11:38):
Yeah.
Mike Shelburn (11:38):
damage globally.
Steve Mancini (11:39):
Yeah.
It's wild.
So, so, so let's dial in a little bit.
A lot of government ITteams are still using those
traditional backup solutions and.
We're now in a different era,so, so how is Zerto fundamentally
different and, and why should thatdifference matter to A CIO or a CISO?
Mike Shelburn (12:05):
Absolutely.
No, great question.
So I mean, it's important to notebefore I dive into specifics,
how fast the world's changed.
You know, I'm a 34-year-old man,and when I went to grade school,
we started with floppy discs, thenUSB drives came, came into play.
Right?
And those were methods ofsaving your work effectively.
Right we're leveraging shared pooled cloudtechnologies for the the same use case.
(12:30):
so my point is as the world changedand the data booms, our way of storing
data changed at the consumer level.
So right at the enterpriselevel the way we do things and
recover also needs to change.
With that said, backuptechnologies, Zerto is not going
in there and ripping them out.
(12:50):
They serve a purpose and, andpartners like Cohesity, right?
We truly have a better together story.
We're zerto becausewe're hypervisor based.
We'll layer in and make those tierzero to tier four workloads extremely
or continuously available, rather thana customer rehydrating from backup.
So if you look at backup technologiesor archive type technologies,
(13:12):
they're scheduled, they're slow,they involve agents, snap shots.
section.
Zerto, we're a fully orchestratedautomated and real time software
that will replicate workloadsevery five to 15 seconds.
And store them in this journal thatare effectively replica checkpoint
copies of your data so you'renot rehydrating from backups.
Rather you're, you're recoveringfrom these replica copies via one
(13:37):
license brought to you by Zerto.
So effectively Steve, we built for today.
And our software keeps appreciatingwith the change of times, so.
I've already spoke to that timelineof our start to now and how, you know,
we've changed to, to effectively supportcustomer environments as they pertain
(13:59):
to them today, and what's important tothem and what's threatening to them.
Steve Mancini (14:02):
So that makes a lot of sense.
And the way I'm thinking of it is I.You may have a good backup solution.
Okay.
And, and we're not sayingwe're gonna rip all that out.
Like that's, that's notthe goal here, right?
The goal is to really think closelyabout what's important and how your
(14:23):
business is operating so that youcan make some of, some additional
investments to make sure that youcould rapidly recover , that portion.
Any point in time, just about immediatelyin the event of, of some sort of issue.
Mike Shelburn (14:42):
Absolute think business critical workloads and
applications, the ones that.
You're gonna have a fuss about ifthey're not available to your, your
underlying constituents, or the
Steve Mancini (14:52):
Mm-hmm.
Mike Shelburn (14:53):
are life or death, right?
In terms of police, computer aideddispatch needs to be continuously
available to our customers,
And that is the value that Zerto brings.
It ensures that your businessis, is continuous and your data
is continuously available as well.
Steve Mancini (15:10):
Okay, great.
So I mean obviously money and costare, are going to be a concern for
people, but I think what you're sayingis, because you're able to dial in
and focus, that should help reduce someof the costs, some of the complexity.
And, and help solve some of the businesscontinuity without really cutting corners.
(15:33):
Right?
Does that make sense?
Mike Shelburn (15:35):
Absolutely.
No, you're spot on.
That print server might not need tobe continuously available i. those
applications such as ERP, computer-aided,dispatch, door access controls for a
school learning management systems,the things that now make our modern
world spinning go around, those arethe, the workloads that we suggest.
(15:55):
Zerto, protects and coverswithin an organization.
Those things like that print serverexample, potentially can be recovered
from a backup type solution?
, those backups serve a purpose.
However, they're just inherently slow,rehydrating from backup takes time.
You know, by the way, your RPO or dataloss window, is going to be very great.
(16:16):
Whereas Zerto is giving you thosedata checkpoints seconds apart.
You're probably only backing upyour workload or performing backups
rather every 12 or 24 hours.
those are your data loss windows.
With these mission critical applicationsand business critical workloads, you're
not gonna want that much data loss forone, but two, you're gonna need them
(16:37):
readily available and back up online.
ASAP.
Steve Mancini (16:41):
Yeah, no, I can remember being an IT director and we would lose
data , had to recover to a backup andit's like always hated that conversation.
Going to the finance department,it's like, yeah, good news
is I was able to recover.
Bad news is it was, you know, yesterday or, maybe even last week's version, you know,
might not even have been yesterday's.
(17:02):
And it's just like,
Mike Shelburn (17:04):
to ransomware, Steve, like how did you know back then if you were,
if you faced a ransomware event or a cyberattack as an IT director, how did you
know you were recovering from a backupcopy that wasn't, you know, encrypted?
Right.
So with our ransomware detection bit.
I think we are able to get supergranular and really narrow in on that
(17:24):
blast radius and identify that cleancheckpoint for clients to recover
safely, and that's massively important.
Steve Mancini (17:30):
I could definitely see that.
What about legacy tech?
There's a ton of that in state government.
There's always some old system hangingup somewhere and it's just like, oh
yeah, that's, that's this application.
Unfortunately we can't move it orwe can't do this, we can't do that.
How does Zerto help agenciesmodernize, you know, their approach
to DR while still working withsome of those older environments?
Mike Shelburn (17:54):
So you remember when we started how I, I stated that Zerto rest
and resides at that hypervisor level.
your environment can be aheterogeneous hodge Hitachi Dell.
HPE, so the storage, or ratherthe hardware manufacturers do
not matter to our software.
(18:14):
from an on-premise perspective, weneed VMware or Hyper V be interoperable
with that client's current systemssystems as it stands today..
So there's no re-architectureneeded able to scale with Zerto
as your organization grows.
So.
Say you had 20 mission critical VMstoday, it might be 40 down the road.
(18:36):
Right.
But you're not going to have tooutfit all of your assets today with
Zerto making us cost prohibitive.
Right.
We will grow with youin your organization.
so a another thing to mention around,you know, legacy tech, and then cost,
I don't think I mentioned this earlier,but a lot of customers I speak to in
(18:56):
the state, local, and education space.
Obviously have limited budgets.
So sometimes site two orthat DR. On-premise target
site is cost prohibitive.
Zerto, you can leverage cloud technologiesyou can lower infrastructure costs
and staffing costs 'cause you don'thave to manage that second site.
we're gonna also give you non-disruptivedisaster recovery testing capabilities.
(19:21):
So you're gonna be super efficient,and you're not gonna have a massive.
effort from your staff, I remember onecustomer saying, no more pizza parties.
And I, sir, what do, or, or,man, what do you mean by that?
And, and this gentleman said, well, Idon't have to bring the security team,
the infrastructure team, the virtual allmy team, and spend a weekend performing
(19:42):
disaster recovery tests to ensure thatthis super intricate and, and complex
environment or DR. Strategy works.
With Zerto, you can non-disruptivelytest disaster recovery in your
continuation of operations plan, thusbeing more efficient and being lean.
Steve Mancini (19:58):
Yeah, that's, I laughed because that was one
of the things I used to do.
Like whenever we had something, to dosome sort of, you know, testing recovery
or, or just, you know, maybe somethingblew up it was always like, okay, I'll
get the pizza and let's dig in and wemight spend it all night or a weekend.
Yeah.
Mike Shelburn (20:17):
Right?
And I think, and I'm not gonna slander mycompetition, but it goes hand in hand with
this cost complexities conversation iswith Zerto, we're going to replicate into
the cheapest bucket of cloud storage, ifthat is the target that's being leveraged.
So was really made for informationtechnology in our clients, whereas I
(20:37):
think some of the competitive solutions.
Are really geared towards client adoptionand stack adoption or that OEM stack
adoption, whereas we were architectedto provide flexibility and convenience,
scalability, and the ease of use.
And, and, and in a practicalsense, majority of it shops crossed
(21:01):
my, my jurisdiction, , aren'tstandardized on one OEM bed.
this, this flexibility, the heterogeneous, interoperability of Zerto is, is
massively, massively important to ourclients today with limited budgets,
limited skill sets and staffing.
And we're, we're seeing a ton of interest
Steve Mancini (21:18):
All right.
You, you had mentionedsomething a few minutes ago.
I just wanna dig in a little bit deeper.
A lot of agencies are pushing towardshybrid and multi-cloud strategies.
But, but not everybody'sin on public cloud, right?
So how does Zerto support cloud mobilityand protect workloads across on-prem
and then Azure and AWS, the whole mix.
Mike Shelburn (21:40):
We actually support, O-C-I-G-C-P, but those would be
VMware on GCP or VMware on OCI.
Right.
The two clouds that we can supportnatively are AWS and Azure.
again, we're cloud agnostic, justlike we were hardware stack agnostic.
We're cloud agnostic as well, so you canreplicate one VM up to three separate
(22:03):
locations with Zerto, and you can repreplicate on premise as well as to the
cloud, both simultaneously massively.
I important to, to bolsterboth redundancy and resilience
within an organization.
So we're actually going to replicatethe cheapest bucket of storage.
From on-premise to the cloud andthus really drive down those costs,
(22:25):
whereas our competitors are gonnareplicate into a couple buckets higher.
And this can be over a fiveyear, you know, TCO analysis,
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I've seen it myself.
One thing that our clients today instate and local, there's an age old
saying, right, our customers typically,you know, five to 10 years behind 'cause
of policy and, and how long it takes tokind of truly adopt something like cloud.
(22:49):
, with politics, cetera involved.
to give you the ability to innovate tothe cloud, workloads inside the cloud,
and then most importantly, we're goingto alleviate that sense of cloud lock.
And I was just speaking to a customerprior to hopping on with you, Steve.
, this organization has been dabbling withleveraging more and more cloud workloads,
(23:13):
however, they have cloud lock anxiety.
What do I do once I'm there?
How do I get back down?
Zerto all within one license,right at no additional cost will
allow clients to reverse replicatedown back on premise they see fit.
massively important and it allows to scaleto the cloud as clients see fit scale.
Steve Mancini (23:36):
That's great information and definitely something that
people are gonna be curious about.
I. Especially when, you know, youmentioned that , sometimes it
gets very expensive to have that DRsite maybe within your environment.
So, you know, the, the next questionwill be, okay, well public cloud is out
there, so maybe, maybe it's time that westart asking these questions and how we
(23:56):
could leverage it res responsibly, right?
I think that's, that's the key.
Because yes, it can get, it can get.
Outta control quickly.
If you're, if you're not payingattention to what's going on there
Mike Shelburn (24:09):
and Zerto, just add to that, Zerto gives or is available
in both the Amazon or AWS marketplaceas well as the Azure market.
To place.
within both of those cloud programs,we can actually deprecate against
the the overarching cloud commitmentthat this customer has signed up
Customer.
And that
(24:29):
immense value.
I used to work at CDW and I managed a tonof Azure contracts and Azure overages and.
Hitting the commitments, everythingto customer organizations, what
they sign up for, they betterutilize and, and, and leverage.
And what I'm saying isZerto will deprecate that,
commitment, dollar for dollar.
So, if it's a $10,000 of Zerto licensingand you had $10,000 of max spend
(24:53):
available, would go away and dissipate.
So effectively, youknow, repurposing budget.
or, or consolidating invoicingall through, these cloud partners.
So it, it really shows the commitmentto being that agnostic glue point,
if you will, for our customerstoday and just providing flexible
route to procurement innovation.
Steve Mancini (25:16):
Mike, can you, can you share some examples of a state
or a local agency that's alreadymaybe using Zerto and, and what kind
of results have, have they seen?
Mike Shelburn (25:26):
Yeah.
State of Vermont is you know, smalleststate capital, but one of our largest
state consumers of Zerto today, back in2023, they had unprecedented catastrophic
flooding occur up in the Green Mountains.
That was, I think they hadhours of, you know, forecast.
(25:48):
And what they were able to do wasshift workloads from on-premise
to Azure and resume operationand resume production services.
they took on damage via thosefloods to their, their production
data center on premise.
So right then and there, that's amassive testament to the technology.
Our ability to, to, you know, work inyour, on your worst day as as a client.
(26:10):
We have numerous clients trying tounderstand what they can or cannot do.
And as it pertains to Broadcom Zertoallows for clients to adopt cloud
native workloads or Hyper V, right,and be that flexibility point if you
choose to migrate away from VMware.
If those costs are too arduous andyou can't, you can't pay that tap, so
(26:32):
we have a plethora of clients there.
And there's also clients lookingat Zerto to satisfy cyber insurance
policies or compliance policies.
So I'll give you an example.
Harrisonburg Electric down in Virginia.
have nerc compliance regulationsthat they needed to satisfy.
I think
I think there's.
NERC requirements and Zerto was ableto check the box on about 30 of those.
(26:57):
Important, gave them the abilityto sign up for a cyber insurance
policy, but then through overarchinggovernance, body in NERC also
was satisfied with Theo purchase.
So PR pretty cool stuff.
Steve Mancini (27:09):
Hmm.
Yeah, no, that, that's pretty cool.
A lot, a lot of CIOs, you know,that I talk to are, are trying
to follow cloud smart strategies.
They want flexibility, but they're,they're not interested in like
ripping and replacing everything.
H how does Zerto kind of.
Hit the middle ground there.
Mike Shelburn (27:30):
Yeah, so you're able to effectively, as you see fit.
Adopt cloud with Zerto, so your, yourability to replicate one VM up to three
separate locations, one being cloud isof extreme extreme value, but you're
not gonna rip and replace anythingwe allow for flexible cloud adoption.
(27:50):
So you're able to move and testworkloads across teams and across your
enterprise as you see fit with Zerto.
And we can be that bridge or dataportability engine, if you will.
To the cloud.
And then once you're there and yousay you didn't like it, you get
back right down OnPrem with Zerto.
So effectively that, you know,data chaperone if you will.
(28:14):
We'll protect it.
We'll also, you know, if there's aintrusion or, or a hack going on,
we're gonna tell you about it andwe're gonna get you back home safely.
Steve Mancini (28:24):
Nice.
So, so what's on the horizon with Zerto?
Is there any new features orcapabilities coming that would, that
would resonate with state government?
Mike Shelburn (28:33):
Yeah.
So Steve, one thing I, we haven'tspoken to, , but in partnership with
HPE, a referenceable type architecturewith the Zerto cyber resilience vault.
and so we have an the fastest on premisecyber vault within the marketplace today.
and that's due to the fact that Zertois that software layer that allows for
(28:56):
customers to recover from our replicadata copies as opposed to rehydrating from
backup, which every other vault within themarketplace that I know of today, you're
rehydrating from backup, thus taking time.
So that's one thing, one solution there.
We also have Zerto for SAS backup, andI've spoken to you now for 45 minutes
about not being a backup technology.
(29:17):
we do have the capability.
for SaaS backup has the mostbroad protection capabilities
across the Microsoft stacks.
So think Office 365 Teams,dynamic SharePoint, what have you.
are we'll be able to protect thoseworkloads from your organization.
Office 365, Google Workspace, ServiceNow,Okta, and, and a lot others are coming
(29:41):
down the road here and currently in RD.for, from a classical Zerto perspective.
We do have support for, youknow, more platform support.
I'll describe it as right.
Azure Stack and HV are currently on theroadmap as well as VME, your, you know,
Steve Mancini (30:00):
Yes.
Mike Shelburn (30:01):
hypervisor.
And we're extremely, that is numberone on that roadmap I just mentioned.
We're very much looking forwardto supporting that platform.
And we think that, you know, I,I find a little bit of altruism.
With what we do because of the painthat currently has had throughout our
customers, you know, pertaining to theVMware issue in debacle with Broadcom.
(30:21):
looking forward to that as well.
Steve Mancini (30:24):
Yeah, and I just wanna, I wanna tie into something you just said
about the Office 365 and Google thatmaybe a lot of people don't think about.
That's a shared kind ofrecovery environment.
And I, I think people just assumethat, you know, Hey, we're leveraging,
you know, everything's in the cloud.
It's all good.
Mm, you be, you better readthe fine print there, right?
(30:46):
Because they have strict responsibilitiesof what they're responsible for.
And I'll give you an example.
When I was in K 12 we wereresponsible for keeping so much
of let's say email recovery.
For a legal hold and, and alllitigation and things like that.
And so you, you weren't allowedto, have the, a teacher or somebody
(31:09):
go in and go and delete an emailand you not be able to recover it.
And with, with the way Office 365 works,I mean if that's all you have, they
can absolutely go in, delete it, gointo, I think they hold it for 30 days.
They could go in and, and forcibly.
Remove that content.
And if, , you're going to have a case,I can almost guarantee you, whoever's
(31:32):
prosecuting you has a copy of that email.
And if you can't produce that inthe court of law, it looks like
you're hiding it even if you're not.
So, okay.
You could probably make the case that,Hey, I, didn't know it was there.
Okay.
Well, it, it was there and now.
Your, all of your records and,and, and everything are come into
(31:54):
subject because you don't have cleandocumentation and you, you weren't
able to produce that yourself.
So I'm assuming Zerto fitsright in that and is gonna be
able to, to, to help there.
Mike Shelburn (32:06):
You hit the nail on the head, my friend.
You know, one thing you said was you sayyou're a K through 12 organization, or,
or better yet, a higher ed institution.
You have kids come to your schooland your organization for four
years and they leave however, right.
I. times outta 10.
There is a policy mandatingfor long-term archive, so our
(32:26):
So.
does not charge for departed users.
Legacy methodology would be to maintainthat end user's license for X amount
of time, whereas with Zerto, for SASbackup, you can repurpose that license
and we provide unlimited retention.
for a lifetime, those recordswill be readily available.
Another thing that makes oursolution different is we're not
(32:48):
predicated or backbone by backuptech or cloud technologies.
So our competition, they willleverage AWS or Azure under the hood.
Whereas Zerto, we've architecteda solution where it's on premise.
So we're gonna send two copiestwice a day for a, a total of four
copies to two separate Equinixzones or regions for redundancy.
(33:10):
You know, we're winningacross the board because.
I think we've done a good job listeningto our clients and understanding,
you know, pain points and we'resolving for those in real time.
Steve Mancini (33:20):
No, that, that's awesome.
'cause you're exactly right.
There's special education rules and thingslike that where, you know, you may have to
keep records for the life of the student.
Well,
Mike Shelburn (33:29):
Right.
Steve Mancini (33:30):
know, and being able to repurpose that licensing is, is awesome.
So that, that's, that's great.
Mike Shelburn (33:36):
all this is intra id, right?
If that goes the entire suiteor of Office 365 kind of
renders itself in, in operable.
And so intra ID is absolutelytop of mind, but we have a
little bit of not a monopoly.
It's not the word.
But we're doing something differentthan nobody else is providing, and
(33:59):
we're able to back up conditionalaccess policies within intra id,
which is massively important.
And it, you know, of Massachusettsjust had a 30,000 seat intra ID outage.
this is becoming top of minds, foruse cases or examples or, or pain that
like Massachusetts has experienced.
(34:20):
But to your point, governance Right.
Is always changing.
So be able to have these recordsfrom a SaaS backup perspective
is, is crucial in 2025.
Steve Mancini (34:32):
Absolutely.
All right, last question.
If a state agency wants tokick the tires on Zerto, what's
the best way to get started?
Mike Shelburn (34:42):
Yeah.
Steve Mancini (34:42):
How do we get them engaged?
Mike Shelburn (34:44):
yes.
How to get 'em engaged, so.
Steve Mancini (34:47):
So.
Mike Shelburn (34:47):
Reach out to myself or Steve, right?
And what we'll do is have, youknow, a couple conversations and
really have you dive into to thetechnology hand in hand with us.
And we welcome and, and wantproof of concepts, right?
So we'll be able to fact checkanything myself or Steve is,
is stating on this call today,
(35:07):
and, and provide that proof.
We, we offer on my zerto.com.
Free customer labs,hands-on learning labs.
So if you wanted to learn at your ownpace, rather than doing that full fledged
proof of concept, we welcome that as well.
and lastly, , we're gonna makeeverything from cost flexibility
(35:28):
to, you know, procurement routes.
Very flexible.
You know, you can punch out from themarketplaces within Azure and AWS.
we also can accommodate annualizedpayments and we're probably one
of the only software company,still doing perpetual licensing.
So if you wanted to own usoutright, we offer that as well.
It's not just a subscription here at.
Steve Mancini (35:51):
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Mike, this, this hasbeen super insightful.
A Zerto clearly isn't justabout backup, it's about
resilience, flexibility, control.
I really appreciate the conversation.
I mean, I definitely learned some things.
So, so that was great and I'm sure,I'm sure our listeners did too.
So I appreciate you coming on.
Mike Shelburn (36:12):
No, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
I I hope that, you know, listenerslearn something new and, and
hopefully, you know, people feelinclined to, to give us a call and,
and to have a zerto conversation.
Nobody's doing it like us today.
So looking forward to future chats, andit was a pleasure to be here, Steve.
Thanks for the invite.
Steve Mancini (36:31):
Awesome.
No, and listen for our, forour listeners, I, I hope this
conversations spark some questions.
Really got you thinking aboutthe challenges that you may be
facing and, and that, that's,that's the whole goal here, right?
I mean, that, that's why we have the show.
It's really to generate,, thought process, thinking,
(36:51):
how can I solve problems?
How can people like Mike come in?
Help me solve those challenges,get that off my plate and make sure
that I'm safe and resilient in theworld today, which we know is crazy.
So.
Thank you everyone for joining.
Feel free to reach out, keep theconversation going and thanks for
tuning in to Thriving and Ambiguity.
Welcome back to Thriving In Ambiguity, the podcast where we break
down the complexities of technologyideally without losing our mind.
Today we're diving into one of themost critical and often overlooked
parts of state government.
It.
Disaster recovery and data protection.
And joining me today is Mike Shelburn,a leader HPE's Zerto business.
(00:28):
Mike, I really appreciateyou taking the time today.
Mike Shelburn (00:32):
Steve, it's an honor to be here.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Steve Mancini (00:35):
Let's, let's start from the top.
For the folks who might not befamiliar with Zerto, how does it
fit into the broader HPE portfolio?
Mike Shelburn (00:44):
Yeah, absolutely.
So Zerto was acquired by HewittPackard Enterprise or HPE in 2021.
We are the golden standard pertaining todisaster recovery, business continuity.
And as everyone knows HPE hasa growing and robust portfolio
around those types of solutions.
And, and Zerto really is that Mobilitygrants more resilience and DR and
(01:09):
business continuity layer to our company.
Steve Mancini (01:13):
Nice.
No, no.
That's great.
You've been with with Zerto a long time.
Mike Shelburn (01:17):
So after a 10 year career at CDWG, I'm on my second
year this April, here at HPE Zerto.
Steve Mancini (01:24):
Mike, as we're getting ready to kind of talk through some of
Zerto, I, I think it would be great ifyou gave the audience maybe a little
bit of an overview of, what Zerto isand maybe what it brings to the table
Mike Shelburn (01:36):
Absolutely Steve.
So Zerto, we are a, a softwaresolution devoted to business
continuity and disaster recovery.
So in essence, we're an iTsoftware resilience platform.
goal and mission around the globe isto provide our customers the smallest
amount of lost data, coupled with thefastest recovery times possible, bar
none the face of any type of disruption.
(01:59):
The scope of our software and my software, is that we support virtualized workloads
across on premise, hybrid cloud, andmulti-cloud environments, and we do that.
Agnostically will work with anycustomer's current hardware and
cloud stack as it stands today.
Steve Mancini (02:16):
Oh, that, that's really cool.
I mean, I think that brings a lotof value to customers who maybe you
know, don't necessarily want, ormaybe they've made an investment and,
and they have some equipment, andwhat you're saying basically is you
don't have to throw all that out.
Right.
Mike Shelburn (02:31):
No, sir. I mean for the past 20,25 years
zerto has appreciated with.
It the world changing, and what Imean by being an appreciative asset
is when we got our start in 2009, wewere devoted to specifically business
continuity and disaster recovery.
forward to the mid 2010s, right?
(02:54):
The ability to replicate into thecloud, of the cloud and back down on
premise, became available to our clients.
additionally, or most recently, inApril of 2023, as the world experienced
greater impacts of cyber attacks andransomware, Zerto now has the capability
at the block level of client data todetect anomalous encryption activities.
(03:16):
Furthermore, we'll narrow in on thatblast radius and give our clients the
visibility to a clean checkpoints rerecover safely in, in faces of in the face
of rather cyber crimes and cyber attack.
Steve Mancini (03:29):
One of the things I keep hearing about, and I, I think it'd be
good to elaborate on, is I keep hearingthis acronym, CDP, you know, and I,
I hear it, it's a game changer, but.
How does that relate to public sector?
And what is CDP.
Mike Shelburn (03:47):
Oh, great question.
CDP is our foundation right here at.
Continuous data protection or CDP Right.
Differs from, and I thinkit's, you know, I learned by
understanding a baseline, right?
So how we differ from traditionalbackups, which occurred 12 hours or
20, every 24 hours with our clients.
(04:08):
CDP and the Zerto Journal gives customersthe capability effectively make their
data streamable, think like a DVR.
So we have a real time journal.
We allow our customers to kind of rollback via replica checkpoints of their
data and resume operations and restoreproduction to the site of their choosing.
(04:31):
So it's essential, right, in myopinion, for ransomware response and
operational continuity today in 2025.
Steve Mancini (04:39):
Okay, nice.
So the DVR example is an interesting one.
So you're saying if I had some sort ofissue, could be ransomware, it could
be just something else, maybe one of myit, you know, staff members accidentally
deleted a folder they shouldn't have.
You're able to then kind ofpull that back, you know, how,
(05:01):
how, what's the timeframe?
Mike Shelburn (05:03):
Yeah, no.
Rewind 'em to cover.
So Zerto back in 20 2009 becamethe golden standard within disaster
recovery and business continuity.
For this very reason, we'regonna replicate workloads
every five to 15 seconds.
From site A to site B, and site Bcontains that Zerto journal where
effectively you'll have replicacopies stored on preexisting
(05:24):
hardware that the customer provides.
So no need to buy additionalhardware to support my, my software.
And effectively your databecomes streamable that journal.
So you'll have checkpoints or our RPO'srather, recovery point objectives.
Steve Mancini (05:40):
Mm-hmm.
Mike Shelburn (05:41):
Effectively five to 15 seconds apart.
Mileage varies, but that those arethe, the averages as it stands today.
Steve Mancini (05:48):
Oh, that's, that's, that's awesome.
I could see huge value in that.
Now you mentioned ransomware.
Let's, let's dig into that.
All right, so ransomware is everywherein, in state and local government.
It.
And, and a lot of the times when I'mhaving conversations, what I like to
say, it, it's not a matter of of whenor if it's, it's a matter of when.
(06:10):
You just spoke of Zerto's,journal based recovery.
But let, let's dig into that as faras how, how will that help agencies
get a better shot of recovering.
And, eliminate the need to potentiallyhave to pay those ransomware demands.
Mike Shelburn (06:27):
Oh, great.
Great
Great.
Good point, Steve.
So
we have
Steve Mancini (06:30):
we.
Mike Shelburn (06:30):
pending algorithms within our software today.
That in real time, we'll detectmalicious encryption events.
And furthermore, within that journalyou just spoke to or spoke of, rather
we'll identify where the maliciousencryption activity occurred to down
to the minute and second, we'll alsoidentify a clean checkpoint for our
customers to be able to then rollback and resume production recover.
(06:54):
So effectively we're gonna give you theability to rewind to a clean state prior
to that malicious encryption event.
recover in minutes without payingthe ransom, as opposed to, you know,
rehydrating from backups, right?
And, and really causing, youknow, monetary damages to rise.
But also that black eye, right,that organizational black eye in,
(07:17):
in reputational black eye will besmaller with Zerto, As you're able to
restore production, resume operationsmore effectively and quickly.
Steve Mancini (07:27):
Yeah, no, that, that's a great point.
And, and the other piecethat I really like to tell.
Customers as I'm having conversations,you know, look, at the end of the day
there is a cost and I'm gonna follow upwith, with a cost question down the road.
But look, there's, there's a cost to someof this and, and a lot of times, as I've
had conversations with CIOs and it's like,well, you know, we're on a tight budget.
(07:51):
How are I gonna afford it?
I said, look, at the end of the day.
Get it off of your desk,because when that, cyber event
happens, can you recover?
Because, you know, if, if you can't,then you are risking your job, you're
risking a lot of different things.
And so being able to have the confidenceto say, Hey, yes, I can recover and I
(08:16):
can recover quickly is super important.
And yes, there's a costassociated with that.
But I always say get it up the chain.
Make financial, make that choicethat says, Hey, we're not gonna
make this investment because.
Someone's gonna ask a question.
If you have that kind of ransomwareevent, and you're put in that, terrible
(08:37):
situation, and you don't want ever seeanyone in they're gonna start asking
questions, well, why weren't we prepared?
Why didn't you have the systems toput in place to be able to recover?
Why am I having now to pay this ransom?
And so, at the very least, youshould be able to say, well.
I put that on your desk.
We looked at Zerto.
(08:58):
It's an awesome solution, , youdidn't wanna fund it, so get it off.
Get it off your plate.
Mike Shelburn (09:04):
No, for sure.
And I think one, one thing I justread, Steve was very interesting to me.
So NIST right, is a, a framework andorganization that, you know, state,
local and education customers follow.
And they just published a reportand it was, it was very interesting.
And I wrote, wrote down some facts.
So in 2023 at the federalgovernment, layer $8 billion were
(09:28):
spent in preventative technologies,
the silences, the CrowdStrike of theworld, if you will, $450 million were
spent on recovery technologies across theboard at the federal government layer.
Fast forward to 2024.
The cost of preventative technologieswent up $1 billion, right.
(09:48):
To 9 billion in total.
But we saw a drastic spike with recoverytechnology expenditures from 450 million
to over, slightly over $2 billion.
So there's a, there's a paradigmshift occurring here, right.
And you said it before better than thanI, that it's not if, but when, and I
hate being a fear monger professionally.
Right.
(10:08):
And I'm not trying to dothat, think it's important to.
For myself and, you know, effectivelymy customers and your customers
to look in the mirror and askthemselves, are they prepared?
Because it truly is not if, but whenthese these malicious occurrences
happening more rapidly and they'rehappening to institutions and verticals
(10:31):
of government that are most exposed.
Back in 2020 4K, 12 institutions were thenumber one public institutions rather.
number one attacked vector withinAmerica today, so scary stuff.
Steve Mancini (10:45):
Well, it's funny because I, I think some people
think that, you know, these.
These hackers are just thesepeople in somebody's basement
in like a third world country.
And it's like, dude, no,these are are normal people.
It may be in, in Russia or youknow, some other country like.
(11:07):
Okay.
That, that piece may be true, butthese are people that come to work
every day as professionals andthey're sitting at a desk and their
job is to find, you know, and exploitpeople's data, like that's their job.
They don't, they don't see it aslike, I'm this, this, this bad person.
They're just doing their job.
Mike Shelburn (11:25):
They're just doing their job and there's, there's
sanctioned countries performingransomware as a service, right.
And there's a whole methodology and,and, you know, playbook if you will,
for those, those folks to, causea lot of headaches and do a lot
Steve Mancini (11:38):
Yeah.
Mike Shelburn (11:38):
damage globally.
Steve Mancini (11:39):
Yeah.
It's wild.
So, so, so let's dial in a little bit.
A lot of government ITteams are still using those
traditional backup solutions and.
We're now in a different era,so, so how is Zerto fundamentally
different and, and why should thatdifference matter to A CIO or a CISO?
Mike Shelburn (12:05):
Absolutely.
No, great question.
So I mean, it's important to notebefore I dive into specifics,
how fast the world's changed.
You know, I'm a 34-year-old man,and when I went to grade school,
we started with floppy discs, thenUSB drives came, came into play.
Right?
And those were methods ofsaving your work effectively.
Right we're leveraging shared pooled cloudtechnologies for the the same use case.
(12:30):
so my point is as the world changedand the data booms, our way of storing
data changed at the consumer level.
So right at the enterpriselevel the way we do things and
recover also needs to change.
With that said, backuptechnologies, Zerto is not going
in there and ripping them out.
(12:50):
They serve a purpose and, andpartners like Cohesity, right?
We truly have a better together story.
We're zerto becausewe're hypervisor based.
We'll layer in and make those tierzero to tier four workloads extremely
or continuously available, rather thana customer rehydrating from backup.
So if you look at backup technologiesor archive type technologies,
(13:12):
they're scheduled, they're slow,they involve agents, snap shots.
section.
Zerto, we're a fully orchestratedautomated and real time software
that will replicate workloadsevery five to 15 seconds.
And store them in this journal thatare effectively replica checkpoint
copies of your data so you'renot rehydrating from backups.
Rather you're, you're recoveringfrom these replica copies via one
(13:37):
license brought to you by Zerto.
So effectively Steve, we built for today.
And our software keeps appreciatingwith the change of times, so.
I've already spoke to that timelineof our start to now and how, you know,
we've changed to, to effectively supportcustomer environments as they pertain
(13:59):
to them today, and what's important tothem and what's threatening to them.
Steve Mancini (14:02):
So that makes a lot of sense.
And the way I'm thinking of it is I.You may have a good backup solution.
Okay.
And, and we're not sayingwe're gonna rip all that out.
Like that's, that's notthe goal here, right?
The goal is to really think closelyabout what's important and how your
(14:23):
business is operating so that youcan make some of, some additional
investments to make sure that youcould rapidly recover , that portion.
Any point in time, just about immediatelyin the event of, of some sort of issue.
Mike Shelburn (14:42):
Absolute think business critical workloads and
applications, the ones that.
You're gonna have a fuss about ifthey're not available to your, your
underlying constituents, or the
Steve Mancini (14:52):
Mm-hmm.
Mike Shelburn (14:53):
are life or death, right?
In terms of police, computer aideddispatch needs to be continuously
available to our customers,
And that is the value that Zerto brings.
It ensures that your businessis, is continuous and your data
is continuously available as well.
Steve Mancini (15:10):
Okay, great.
So I mean obviously money and costare, are going to be a concern for
people, but I think what you're sayingis, because you're able to dial in
and focus, that should help reduce someof the costs, some of the complexity.
And, and help solve some of the businesscontinuity without really cutting corners.
(15:33):
Right?
Does that make sense?
Mike Shelburn (15:35):
Absolutely.
No, you're spot on.
That print server might not need tobe continuously available i. those
applications such as ERP, computer-aided,dispatch, door access controls for a
school learning management systems,the things that now make our modern
world spinning go around, those arethe, the workloads that we suggest.
(15:55):
Zerto, protects and coverswithin an organization.
Those things like that print serverexample, potentially can be recovered
from a backup type solution?
, those backups serve a purpose.
However, they're just inherently slow,rehydrating from backup takes time.
You know, by the way, your RPO or dataloss window, is going to be very great.
(16:16):
Whereas Zerto is giving you thosedata checkpoints seconds apart.
You're probably only backing upyour workload or performing backups
rather every 12 or 24 hours.
those are your data loss windows.
With these mission critical applicationsand business critical workloads, you're
not gonna want that much data loss forone, but two, you're gonna need them
(16:37):
readily available and back up online.
ASAP.
Steve Mancini (16:41):
Yeah, no, I can remember being an IT director and we would lose
data , had to recover to a backup andit's like always hated that conversation.
Going to the finance department,it's like, yeah, good news
is I was able to recover.
Bad news is it was, you know, yesterday or, maybe even last week's version, you know,
might not even have been yesterday's.
(17:02):
And it's just like,
Mike Shelburn (17:04):
to ransomware, Steve, like how did you know back then if you were,
if you faced a ransomware event or a cyberattack as an IT director, how did you
know you were recovering from a backupcopy that wasn't, you know, encrypted?
Right.
So with our ransomware detection bit.
I think we are able to get supergranular and really narrow in on that
(17:24):
blast radius and identify that cleancheckpoint for clients to recover
safely, and that's massively important.
Steve Mancini (17:30):
I could definitely see that.
What about legacy tech?
There's a ton of that in state government.
There's always some old system hangingup somewhere and it's just like, oh
yeah, that's, that's this application.
Unfortunately we can't move it orwe can't do this, we can't do that.
How does Zerto help agenciesmodernize, you know, their approach
to DR while still working withsome of those older environments?
Mike Shelburn (17:54):
So you remember when we started how I, I stated that Zerto rest
and resides at that hypervisor level.
your environment can be aheterogeneous hodge Hitachi Dell.
HPE, so the storage, or ratherthe hardware manufacturers do
not matter to our software.
(18:14):
from an on-premise perspective, weneed VMware or Hyper V be interoperable
with that client's current systemssystems as it stands today..
So there's no re-architectureneeded able to scale with Zerto
as your organization grows.
So.
Say you had 20 mission critical VMstoday, it might be 40 down the road.
(18:36):
Right.
But you're not going to have tooutfit all of your assets today with
Zerto making us cost prohibitive.
Right.
We will grow with youin your organization.
so a another thing to mention around,you know, legacy tech, and then cost,
I don't think I mentioned this earlier,but a lot of customers I speak to in
(18:56):
the state, local, and education space.
Obviously have limited budgets.
So sometimes site two orthat DR. On-premise target
site is cost prohibitive.
Zerto, you can leverage cloud technologiesyou can lower infrastructure costs
and staffing costs 'cause you don'thave to manage that second site.
we're gonna also give you non-disruptivedisaster recovery testing capabilities.
(19:21):
So you're gonna be super efficient,and you're not gonna have a massive.
effort from your staff, I remember onecustomer saying, no more pizza parties.
And I, sir, what do, or, or,man, what do you mean by that?
And, and this gentleman said, well, Idon't have to bring the security team,
the infrastructure team, the virtual allmy team, and spend a weekend performing
(19:42):
disaster recovery tests to ensure thatthis super intricate and, and complex
environment or DR. Strategy works.
With Zerto, you can non-disruptivelytest disaster recovery in your
continuation of operations plan, thusbeing more efficient and being lean.
Steve Mancini (19:58):
Yeah, that's, I laughed because that was one
of the things I used to do.
Like whenever we had something, to dosome sort of, you know, testing recovery
or, or just, you know, maybe somethingblew up it was always like, okay, I'll
get the pizza and let's dig in and wemight spend it all night or a weekend.
Yeah.
Mike Shelburn (20:17):
Right?
And I think, and I'm not gonna slander mycompetition, but it goes hand in hand with
this cost complexities conversation iswith Zerto, we're going to replicate into
the cheapest bucket of cloud storage, ifthat is the target that's being leveraged.
So was really made for informationtechnology in our clients, whereas I
(20:37):
think some of the competitive solutions.
Are really geared towards client adoptionand stack adoption or that OEM stack
adoption, whereas we were architectedto provide flexibility and convenience,
scalability, and the ease of use.
And, and, and in a practicalsense, majority of it shops crossed
(21:01):
my, my jurisdiction, , aren'tstandardized on one OEM bed.
this, this flexibility, the heterogeneous, interoperability of Zerto is, is
massively, massively important to ourclients today with limited budgets,
limited skill sets and staffing.
And we're, we're seeing a ton of interest
Steve Mancini (21:18):
All right.
You, you had mentionedsomething a few minutes ago.
I just wanna dig in a little bit deeper.
A lot of agencies are pushing towardshybrid and multi-cloud strategies.
But, but not everybody'sin on public cloud, right?
So how does Zerto support cloud mobilityand protect workloads across on-prem
and then Azure and AWS, the whole mix.
Mike Shelburn (21:40):
We actually support, O-C-I-G-C-P, but those would be
VMware on GCP or VMware on OCI.
Right.
The two clouds that we can supportnatively are AWS and Azure.
again, we're cloud agnostic, justlike we were hardware stack agnostic.
We're cloud agnostic as well, so you canreplicate one VM up to three separate
(22:03):
locations with Zerto, and you can repreplicate on premise as well as to the
cloud, both simultaneously massively.
I important to, to bolsterboth redundancy and resilience
within an organization.
So we're actually going to replicatethe cheapest bucket of storage.
From on-premise to the cloud andthus really drive down those costs,
(22:25):
whereas our competitors are gonnareplicate into a couple buckets higher.
And this can be over a fiveyear, you know, TCO analysis,
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I've seen it myself.
One thing that our clients today instate and local, there's an age old
saying, right, our customers typically,you know, five to 10 years behind 'cause
of policy and, and how long it takes tokind of truly adopt something like cloud.
(22:49):
, with politics, cetera involved.
to give you the ability to innovate tothe cloud, workloads inside the cloud,
and then most importantly, we're goingto alleviate that sense of cloud lock.
And I was just speaking to a customerprior to hopping on with you, Steve.
, this organization has been dabbling withleveraging more and more cloud workloads,
(23:13):
however, they have cloud lock anxiety.
What do I do once I'm there?
How do I get back down?
Zerto all within one license,right at no additional cost will
allow clients to reverse replicatedown back on premise they see fit.
massively important and it allows to scaleto the cloud as clients see fit scale.
Steve Mancini (23:36):
That's great information and definitely something that
people are gonna be curious about.
I. Especially when, you know, youmentioned that , sometimes it
gets very expensive to have that DRsite maybe within your environment.
So, you know, the, the next questionwill be, okay, well public cloud is out
there, so maybe, maybe it's time that westart asking these questions and how we
(23:56):
could leverage it res responsibly, right?
I think that's, that's the key.
Because yes, it can get, it can get.
Outta control quickly.
If you're, if you're not payingattention to what's going on there
Mike Shelburn (24:09):
and Zerto, just add to that, Zerto gives or is available
in both the Amazon or AWS marketplaceas well as the Azure market.
To place.
within both of those cloud programs,we can actually deprecate against
the the overarching cloud commitmentthat this customer has signed up
Customer.
And that
(24:29):
immense value.
I used to work at CDW and I managed a tonof Azure contracts and Azure overages and.
Hitting the commitments, everythingto customer organizations, what
they sign up for, they betterutilize and, and, and leverage.
And what I'm saying isZerto will deprecate that,
commitment, dollar for dollar.
So, if it's a $10,000 of Zerto licensingand you had $10,000 of max spend
(24:53):
available, would go away and dissipate.
So effectively, youknow, repurposing budget.
or, or consolidating invoicingall through, these cloud partners.
So it, it really shows the commitmentto being that agnostic glue point,
if you will, for our customerstoday and just providing flexible
route to procurement innovation.
Steve Mancini (25:16):
Mike, can you, can you share some examples of a state
or a local agency that's alreadymaybe using Zerto and, and what kind
of results have, have they seen?
Mike Shelburn (25:26):
Yeah.
State of Vermont is you know, smalleststate capital, but one of our largest
state consumers of Zerto today, back in2023, they had unprecedented catastrophic
flooding occur up in the Green Mountains.
That was, I think they hadhours of, you know, forecast.
(25:48):
And what they were able to do wasshift workloads from on-premise
to Azure and resume operationand resume production services.
they took on damage via thosefloods to their, their production
data center on premise.
So right then and there, that's amassive testament to the technology.
Our ability to, to, you know, work inyour, on your worst day as as a client.
(26:10):
We have numerous clients trying tounderstand what they can or cannot do.
And as it pertains to Broadcom Zertoallows for clients to adopt cloud
native workloads or Hyper V, right,and be that flexibility point if you
choose to migrate away from VMware.
If those costs are too arduous andyou can't, you can't pay that tap, so
(26:32):
we have a plethora of clients there.
And there's also clients lookingat Zerto to satisfy cyber insurance
policies or compliance policies.
So I'll give you an example.
Harrisonburg Electric down in Virginia.
have nerc compliance regulationsthat they needed to satisfy.
I think
I think there's.
NERC requirements and Zerto was ableto check the box on about 30 of those.
(26:57):
Important, gave them the abilityto sign up for a cyber insurance
policy, but then through overarchinggovernance, body in NERC also
was satisfied with Theo purchase.
So PR pretty cool stuff.
Steve Mancini (27:09):
Hmm.
Yeah, no, that, that's pretty cool.
A lot, a lot of CIOs, you know,that I talk to are, are trying
to follow cloud smart strategies.
They want flexibility, but they're,they're not interested in like
ripping and replacing everything.
H how does Zerto kind of.
Hit the middle ground there.
Mike Shelburn (27:30):
Yeah, so you're able to effectively, as you see fit.
Adopt cloud with Zerto, so your, yourability to replicate one VM up to three
separate locations, one being cloud isof extreme extreme value, but you're
not gonna rip and replace anythingwe allow for flexible cloud adoption.
(27:50):
So you're able to move and testworkloads across teams and across your
enterprise as you see fit with Zerto.
And we can be that bridge or dataportability engine, if you will.
To the cloud.
And then once you're there and yousay you didn't like it, you get
back right down OnPrem with Zerto.
So effectively that, you know,data chaperone if you will.
(28:14):
We'll protect it.
We'll also, you know, if there's aintrusion or, or a hack going on,
we're gonna tell you about it andwe're gonna get you back home safely.
Steve Mancini (28:24):
Nice.
So, so what's on the horizon with Zerto?
Is there any new features orcapabilities coming that would, that
would resonate with state government?
Mike Shelburn (28:33):
Yeah.
So Steve, one thing I, we haven'tspoken to, , but in partnership with
HPE, a referenceable type architecturewith the Zerto cyber resilience vault.
and so we have an the fastest on premisecyber vault within the marketplace today.
and that's due to the fact that Zertois that software layer that allows for
(28:56):
customers to recover from our replicadata copies as opposed to rehydrating from
backup, which every other vault within themarketplace that I know of today, you're
rehydrating from backup, thus taking time.
So that's one thing, one solution there.
We also have Zerto for SAS backup, andI've spoken to you now for 45 minutes
about not being a backup technology.
(29:17):
we do have the capability.
for SaaS backup has the mostbroad protection capabilities
across the Microsoft stacks.
So think Office 365 Teams,dynamic SharePoint, what have you.
are we'll be able to protect thoseworkloads from your organization.
Office 365, Google Workspace, ServiceNow,Okta, and, and a lot others are coming
(29:41):
down the road here and currently in RD.for, from a classical Zerto perspective.
We do have support for, youknow, more platform support.
I'll describe it as right.
Azure Stack and HV are currently on theroadmap as well as VME, your, you know,
Steve Mancini (30:00):
Yes.
Mike Shelburn (30:01):
hypervisor.
And we're extremely, that is numberone on that roadmap I just mentioned.
We're very much looking forwardto supporting that platform.
And we think that, you know, I,I find a little bit of altruism.
With what we do because of the painthat currently has had throughout our
customers, you know, pertaining to theVMware issue in debacle with Broadcom.
(30:21):
looking forward to that as well.
Steve Mancini (30:24):
Yeah, and I just wanna, I wanna tie into something you just said
about the Office 365 and Google thatmaybe a lot of people don't think about.
That's a shared kind ofrecovery environment.
And I, I think people just assumethat, you know, Hey, we're leveraging,
you know, everything's in the cloud.
It's all good.
Mm, you be, you better readthe fine print there, right?
(30:46):
Because they have strict responsibilitiesof what they're responsible for.
And I'll give you an example.
When I was in K 12 we wereresponsible for keeping so much
of let's say email recovery.
For a legal hold and, and alllitigation and things like that.
And so you, you weren't allowedto, have the, a teacher or somebody
(31:09):
go in and go and delete an emailand you not be able to recover it.
And with, with the way Office 365 works,I mean if that's all you have, they
can absolutely go in, delete it, gointo, I think they hold it for 30 days.
They could go in and, and forcibly.
Remove that content.
And if, , you're going to have a case,I can almost guarantee you, whoever's
(31:32):
prosecuting you has a copy of that email.
And if you can't produce that inthe court of law, it looks like
you're hiding it even if you're not.
So, okay.
You could probably make the case that,Hey, I, didn't know it was there.
Okay.
Well, it, it was there and now.
Your, all of your records and,and, and everything are come into
(31:54):
subject because you don't have cleandocumentation and you, you weren't
able to produce that yourself.
So I'm assuming Zerto fitsright in that and is gonna be
able to, to, to help there.
Mike Shelburn (32:06):
You hit the nail on the head, my friend.
You know, one thing you said was you sayyou're a K through 12 organization, or,
or better yet, a higher ed institution.
You have kids come to your schooland your organization for four
years and they leave however, right.
I. times outta 10.
There is a policy mandatingfor long-term archive, so our
(32:26):
So.
does not charge for departed users.
Legacy methodology would be to maintainthat end user's license for X amount
of time, whereas with Zerto, for SASbackup, you can repurpose that license
and we provide unlimited retention.
for a lifetime, those recordswill be readily available.
Another thing that makes oursolution different is we're not
(32:48):
predicated or backbone by backuptech or cloud technologies.
So our competition, they willleverage AWS or Azure under the hood.
Whereas Zerto, we've architecteda solution where it's on premise.
So we're gonna send two copiestwice a day for a, a total of four
copies to two separate Equinixzones or regions for redundancy.
(33:10):
You know, we're winningacross the board because.
I think we've done a good job listeningto our clients and understanding,
you know, pain points and we'resolving for those in real time.
Steve Mancini (33:20):
No, that, that's awesome.
'cause you're exactly right.
There's special education rules and thingslike that where, you know, you may have to
keep records for the life of the student.
Well,
Mike Shelburn (33:29):
Right.
Steve Mancini (33:30):
know, and being able to repurpose that licensing is, is awesome.
So that, that's, that's great.
Mike Shelburn (33:36):
all this is intra id, right?
If that goes the entire suiteor of Office 365 kind of
renders itself in, in operable.
And so intra ID is absolutelytop of mind, but we have a
little bit of not a monopoly.
It's not the word.
But we're doing something differentthan nobody else is providing, and
(33:59):
we're able to back up conditionalaccess policies within intra id,
which is massively important.
And it, you know, of Massachusettsjust had a 30,000 seat intra ID outage.
this is becoming top of minds, foruse cases or examples or, or pain that
like Massachusetts has experienced.
(34:20):
But to your point, governance Right.
Is always changing.
So be able to have these recordsfrom a SaaS backup perspective
is, is crucial in 2025.
Steve Mancini (34:32):
Absolutely.
All right, last question.
If a state agency wants tokick the tires on Zerto, what's
the best way to get started?
Mike Shelburn (34:42):
Yeah.
Steve Mancini (34:42):
How do we get them engaged?
Mike Shelburn (34:44):
yes.
How to get 'em engaged, so.
Steve Mancini (34:47):
So.
Mike Shelburn (34:47):
Reach out to myself or Steve, right?
And what we'll do is have, youknow, a couple conversations and
really have you dive into to thetechnology hand in hand with us.
And we welcome and, and wantproof of concepts, right?
So we'll be able to fact checkanything myself or Steve is,
is stating on this call today,
(35:07):
and, and provide that proof.
We, we offer on my zerto.com.
Free customer labs,hands-on learning labs.
So if you wanted to learn at your ownpace, rather than doing that full fledged
proof of concept, we welcome that as well.
and lastly, , we're gonna makeeverything from cost flexibility
(35:28):
to, you know, procurement routes.
Very flexible.
You know, you can punch out from themarketplaces within Azure and AWS.
we also can accommodate annualizedpayments and we're probably one
of the only software company,still doing perpetual licensing.
So if you wanted to own usoutright, we offer that as well.
It's not just a subscription here at.
Steve Mancini (35:51):
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Mike, this, this hasbeen super insightful.
A Zerto clearly isn't justabout backup, it's about
resilience, flexibility, control.
I really appreciate the conversation.
I mean, I definitely learned some things.
So, so that was great and I'm sure,I'm sure our listeners did too.
So I appreciate you coming on.
Mike Shelburn (36:12):
No, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
I I hope that, you know, listenerslearn something new and, and
hopefully, you know, people feelinclined to, to give us a call and,
and to have a zerto conversation.
Nobody's doing it like us today.
So looking forward to future chats, andit was a pleasure to be here, Steve.
Thanks for the invite.
Steve Mancini (36:31):
Awesome.
No, and listen for our, forour listeners, I, I hope this
conversations spark some questions.
Really got you thinking aboutthe challenges that you may be
facing and, and that, that's,that's the whole goal here, right?
I mean, that, that's why we have the show.
It's really to generate,, thought process, thinking,
(36:51):
how can I solve problems?
How can people like Mike come in?
Help me solve those challenges,get that off my plate and make sure
that I'm safe and resilient in theworld today, which we know is crazy.
So.
Thank you everyone for joining.
Feel free to reach out, keep theconversation going and thanks for
tuning in to Thriving and Ambiguity.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.