Disaster Recovery with Zerto — Latin America
Zerto IT Resilience Platform for continuous data protection, journal-based recovery with RPO in seconds and RTO in minutes — the most advanced disaster recovery and ransomware recovery platform available for Latin American organizations
Traditional disaster recovery has a fundamental limitation that most Latin American organizations have accepted as unavoidable: the recovery point objective (RPO) is defined by the backup interval. If your backup runs every hour, you can lose up to one hour of data when a disaster strikes. If the backup runs nightly, you can lose up to 24 hours. This limitation is not a technology constraint — it is an architectural constraint of snapshot-based backup and replication.
Zerto eliminates this constraint with continuous data protection (CDP): a hypervisor-level journal that captures every write to every protected VM and continuously ships it to the recovery site. The result: RPO measured in seconds (typically 5-30 seconds), not hours — and journal-based recovery that allows organizations to roll back to any point in time within the journal retention window, not just the last backup point.
For Latin American organizations — particularly financial institutions under CNBS and SBP supervision, healthcare organizations with operational continuity obligations, and manufacturers with international delivery contracts that cannot survive extended downtime — Zerto’s RPO and RTO capabilities represent a fundamentally different level of business resilience than traditional backup-based DR.
How Zerto Works
Zerto installs as a lightweight virtual appliance (Zerto Virtual Manager) in your VMware or Hyper-V environment. Individual VMs are enrolled in Zerto Protection Groups. For each protected VM, a Virtual Replication Appliance (VRA) intercepts storage writes at the hypervisor level — before they reach the datastore — and continuously ships them to the recovery site via Zerto’s journal mechanism.
The journal stores every write for the configured retention period (typically 7-30 days). Recovery is possible to any point in time within the journal: the last 5 seconds before a ransomware event began, a specific transaction time before a database corruption, or the exact state at any hour of the previous week. This journal-based recovery capability is fundamentally different from snapshot recovery, which can only restore to the points in time when snapshots were taken.
Zerto Use Cases for Latin American Organizations
Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware recovery is Zerto’s fastest-growing use case in Latin America, and the one where the RPO advantage is most compelling. When ransomware begins encrypting files, it typically completes the encryption within hours. If your backup runs every 24 hours, you could lose a day of transactions. With Zerto CDP, you can roll back to any point in the journal — including the seconds immediately before the ransomware began encrypting — limiting data loss to seconds rather than hours.
Zerto’s ransomware recovery workflow: detect the start of the encryption event (via automated anomaly detection or manual identification), identify the exact timestamp in the Zerto journal that precedes the infection, initiate recovery to that timestamp, and restore operations. RTO for ransomware recovery with Zerto is typically 15-45 minutes for the full environment. Compare this to ransomware recovery from traditional backup: typically 3-21 days.
Disaster Recovery for Financial Institutions
For financial institutions supervised by CNBS (Honduras), SBP (Panama) and SUGEF (Costa Rica), business continuity requirements specify maximum acceptable downtime and data loss for critical systems. For core banking, payment processing and customer-facing systems, these requirements often cannot be satisfied by hourly or daily backup-based replication. Zerto CDP provides the RPO (seconds) and RTO (minutes) required for financial institution regulatory compliance, with the reporting and testing automation that demonstrates compliance to regulators.
Multi-Site and Cloud DR
Zerto supports replication to multiple targets simultaneously: on-premise secondary data center, AWS, Azure and OVH Cloud. For Latin American organizations, this flexibility enables a tiered DR architecture: replicate tier-1 systems continuously to an on-premise secondary site for fast local recovery, and replicate to cloud for geo-redundancy against a site-level disaster. Zerto’s cloud integration uses native cloud storage for the journal, eliminating the need to provision and manage cloud compute infrastructure until a failover is actually needed.
Non-Disruptive DR Testing
One of the most underappreciated capabilities of Zerto is its non-disruptive testing: Zerto can fail over any Protection Group to an isolated test environment using any point in the journal, verify that the applications are functioning correctly, and then tear down the test environment — all without interrupting production. Organizations can test their DR procedures monthly (or weekly) without the maintenance windows and production risk that traditional DR testing requires. For regulators who require evidence of tested DR procedures, Zerto’s automated testing reports provide the documentation needed.
RPO in Seconds
Journal-based CDP captures every hypervisor-level write continuously. RPO as low as 5 seconds. No backup windows, no snapshot scheduling, no data loss window.
RTO in Minutes
Zerto Instant Recovery starts protected VMs at the recovery site directly from the journal in minutes. RTO of 15-45 minutes for complex multi-VM application stacks.
Any-Point-in-Time Recovery
Journal retention of 7-30 days allows recovery to any point in time — including the seconds before a ransomware event, a database corruption or an accidental mass deletion.
Non-Disruptive DR Testing
Zerto test failover runs in an isolated sandbox from journal data without impacting production. Automated test reports provide DR compliance evidence for CNBS, SBP and SUGEF.
Multi-Cloud DR
Replicate to on-premise secondary site, AWS, Azure and OVH Cloud simultaneously. One platform for on-premise and multi-cloud DR without separate tools for each target.
Ransomware Anomaly Detection
Zerto anomaly detection identifies ransomware encryption behavior in real time and alerts, enabling immediate response before the full environment is encrypted.
Frequently Asked Questions — Zerto Latin America
What is the difference between Zerto and Veeam for disaster recovery?
Zerto and Veeam address different points in the data protection spectrum and are frequently deployed together. Veeam provides comprehensive backup: immutable backup copies for long-term retention and ransomware resilience, backup of physical servers, cloud workloads and Microsoft 365, and the 3-2-1-1-0 backup architecture. Zerto provides continuous replication with journal-based recovery for the tier-1 VMware workloads where RPO in seconds and RTO in minutes are required. A typical Latin American enterprise architecture uses both: Zerto for tier-1 systems with strict RPO/RTO requirements, Veeam for the broader backup coverage with immutable copies. GLADiiUM designs and deploys both platforms in integrated architectures.
Does Zerto satisfy CNBS business continuity requirements in Honduras?
Yes. Zerto’s RPO and RTO capabilities exceed the business continuity requirements specified in CNBS Resolution GRD 793/2022 for supervised financial institutions. Zerto’s automated DR testing with documented test reports provides the evidence that CNBS auditors request when reviewing business continuity programs. GLADiiUM has designed Zerto deployments specifically for Honduran financial institutions and can provide guidance on how to configure Zerto to generate the compliance documentation the CNBS inspection process requires.
How much infrastructure does Zerto require at the recovery site?
Zerto’s recovery site requirement is significantly lower than traditional DR architectures. During normal operation (non-failover), the recovery site requires only storage for the journal data and the replicated VM storage. No compute infrastructure needs to be powered on and running at the recovery site during normal operation. Compute is provisioned on-demand when a failover is initiated — which for cloud targets means spinning up cloud compute only when needed, eliminating the cost of maintaining a warm standby environment 24/7.
Achieve RPO in Seconds with Zerto CDP
GLADiiUM will assess your current DR architecture, calculate your actual RPO and RTO, and design a Zerto CDP implementation that achieves the recovery objectives your business and regulators require.
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