Synology launches ActiveProtect

Designed to simplify complex data protection, ActiveProtect offers comprehensive platform support, advanced security and scalability. This is all included within a competitive, transparent pricing model, with businesses able to access full platform support and complete advanced protection features.

“With our heritage in building products for time-poor, and often non-technical, small to medium businesses, ActiveProtect has been designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind,” said Chad Chiang - Managing Director for Synology UK & GmbH.

“With research showing that around 70% of businesses fail within three years of experiencing a cyber attack, ActiveProtect delivers advanced protection against cyber threats alongside real-time backup, with data accessible from any location and easily recoverable whenever the customer needs it.”

The capabilities of the platform sit across backup, recovery and management.

Cost-effective backup

ActiveProtect has been designed to protect everything in a single platform from devices, to Software-as-a-Service programmes, file servers and virtual machines. It does this by using a high efficiency backup engine, complete with features such as optimised storage allocation, incremental backup and deduplication technology.

According to Gartner, cost remains a primary concern for CIOs, and as such within ActiveProtect’s storage allocation capability, the device allows the partitioning of storage into a performance tier and a capacity tier. The benefit of this approach is that it eliminates operational costs and reduces storage costs, all the while delivering enhanced data security.

The solution is able to help enterprises achieve superior performance including a reduction of 99% in data transmission, up to seven times faster SaaS backup and over two times the capacity of backup copy.

Recovery: A 3-2-1-1-0 strategy

With the development of this product, Synology recognised the need to extend recovery assurance beyond the industry standard 3-2-1 rule. That is the rule that recommends having three copies of data, two different media and one off-site copy.

ActiveProtect’s recovery capabilities extend the 3-2-1 industry standard backup strategy to add a further one copy of data which is offline or immutable and ensure zero errors, giving the assurance to security teams that they can recover with confidence.

Simplifying multi-site management

ActiveProtect simplifies multi-site management with capabilities extending to 2.5K sites/backup servers and 150K devices and/or SaaS accounts, allowing for businesses to scale. With the ability to manage all components in the backup ecosystem in a single pane with the efficiency and ease that Synology’s traditional customer base of time-poor and non-technical small businesses need, large-scale organisations can scale with simplicity.

Fast, Visible, Available

One of the key features of ActiveProtect is its advanced security, with the product offering immutable backups, air-gap capabilities and regulatory compliance to help guard against cyber threats. With ActiveProtect, IT teams can be assured that when a back-up is taken, it’s always going to be accessible, however many years later, without the risk of any files being corrupted or inaccessible.

This key feature also enables IT teams to conduct activities such as practice data restorations, a key exercise which allows IT teams to fully understand how to recover their data, should they ever need to, for example in the event of experiencing a cyber attack.

This is particularly important for organisations in the current cyber threat environment. In April 2024 the Government released its annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey which showed that half of businesses (50%) and around a third of charities (32%) had experienced some form of cyber security breach or attack in the previous 12 months.

Chad continued, “Against a backdrop of cyberthreats that are rising in sophistication, scale and speed, preparedness is critical, but it does not need to be complex. The priority of this solution is to offer enterprise customers a trusted platform that is easy to set-up, use and manage. We’re excited to be entering this new market, bringing with us the learnings from our existing customer base, and look forward to playing a role in giving IT teams some peace of mind that they’ve invested in a simple security solution that just works”.

An All-Inclusive Platform

Combining backup, recovery and management in a single appliance, ActiveProtect eliminates the need for separate hardware and software, sizing, purchase and maintenance. It protects PCs, Macs, file and physical servers, virtual machines, databases, and Microsoft 365 services all through one, single intuitive interface.

For enterprise customers, which may have multiple sites across geographies and locations, the ability to protect their data from one place is key. ActiveProtect’s scalable management supports users in viewing or monitoring up to 150,000 workloads or 2,500 sites, providing scalability, enterprise-grade data visibility and control.