Backups are essential, but if you were to assess your organisation for what is backup, when, where, and how, chances are you're going to find many gaps. The rise of cloud providers can lull us into a false sense of security too, with a recent high-profile case where a cloud provider inadvertently deleted a customer's entire environment. Of course, you can use a NAS - such as the many excellent options by Synology - and manually configure and set up all kinds of backups, robocopy scripts, scheduled tasks, and other processes. Or, you could use Synology's new ActiveProtect appliances which provide the hardware and tools all-in-one to help you set and forget your backups.

"The launch of ActiveProtect reflects Synology's unceasing commitment to empowering our users with the tools to manage their most valuable asset—data," said Synology chairman and CEO Philip Wong. "In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face unprecedented challenges in safeguarding their data. With the new ActiveProtect offering, we aim to empower organisations of all sizes to address cybersecurity challenges head-on."

ActiveProtect centralises organisation-wide data protection policies, tasks, and appliances to offer a unified management and control plane. Comprehensive coverage for endpoints, servers, hypervisors, storage systems, databases, and Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace services dramatically reduce IT blind spots and the necessity of operating multiple data protection solutions.

"Organisations are tasked with maintaining overly complex and costly data protection strategies, and we aim to solve all the challenges at once with ActiveProtect," said Synology EVP Jia-Yu Liu. "ActiveProtect is the culmination of extensive research, development, and experience working with our customers. We are confident in delivering a solution that will exceed modern businesses' expectations."

IT teams can quickly deploy ActiveProtect appliances in minutes and create comprehensive data protection plans via global policies using a centralised console. From implementing immutability and air gapping policies to performing recovery procedures, ActiveProtect is designed to be intuitive, significantly reducing operational overhead.

Each ActiveProtect appliance can operate in standalone or cluster-managed modes. Storage capacity can be tiered with Synology NAS/SAN storage solutions, C2 Object Storage, and other clustered ActiveProtect appliances. Additionally, existing Synology Active Backup for Business deployments are manageable from the unified interface, providing high deployment flexibility.

Purpose-built ActiveProtect appliances leverage incremental backups with source-side, global, and cross-site deduplication to ensure fast backups and replication with minimal bandwidth usage. ActiveProtect is up to seven times faster at backing up with a typical deduplication ratio of over 2:1, significantly reducing operating costs.

ActiveProtect will be available through Synology distributors and partners later in 2024.