CBRE reduces disaster recovery exposure risk from 30 minutes to 10 seconds with Zerto and Thomas Duryea

Thomas Duryea Logicalis (TDL) and Zerto have partnered to protect global commercial real estate firm CBRE's virtual machines, and, according to CBRE, reduced the company's risk of exposure window from 30 minutes to under 10 seconds.

CBRE is a US-headquartered commercial real estate services and investment firm with 70,000 employees around the world in about 350 offices.

The company required a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy that did not impact performance. CBRE's main concern was the limitation on how often it could protect its environment because it relied on a protection platform that used snapshot replication.

Zerto Australian and New Zealand country manager Matthew Kates said: "Snapshot replication is better than just doing a single backup, but it causes performance problems in the environment every time it snapshots. You need to pause your system to protect it."

A total of 500 VMs in CBRE's offices in Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong are protected. The protected applications include real estate-specific, financial, human resources, Oracle and SharePoint applications.

Darren Warner, CBRE's regional director for infrastructure operations in Asia-Pacific, said: "There was no other solution that could get us back up and running as quickly as Zerto.

"We reduced our RPO [recovery point objective] from 30 minutes to under 10 seconds, even with the latency between our Hong Kong and Sydney data centres," added Warner.

Because CBRE works closely with financial institutions, it is important for the company to be able to exchange information with them as quickly as possible.

"If we can’t meet these SLAs [service level agreements], the banks can terminate the contract and impact our customers’ ability to secure financing for properties," Warner said.

TDL provided the customer with a test environment that lasted a week. The real estate firm bought the solution soon after the test, according to Kates.

"They now can test DR all the time on a per-application basis without interrupting their environment. Testing more often means the business is more secure," Kates said.

CBRE has a large presence in Australia, with five offices in Sydney, one in South Australia, five in Queensland, one in Canberra, one in Western Australia and two in Melbourne.