Data backup has been a fundamental component of managing digital information. As a provider of data management solutions, Synology has consistently worked to protect our customers' data, with our backup solutions now safeguarding over 25 million devices and accounts, earning widespread market acceptance. Through 25 years of experience in the industry, we've witnessed the evolution of data protection challenges and have continuously adapted our solutions to meet emerging needs.
Yet, we've observed a persistent challenge in the backup market in resource consumption. Data protection is often perceived as a preventive expense rather than a proactive measure to enhance business operations. This perception makes it more difficult for IT teams to justify budget requests to the management teams. Furthermore, with enterprises managing diverse workloads across on-premises, cloud, virtualized, and containerized environments, while confronting evolving attack vectors, IT teams must also consider various protection strategies including deduplication, ensure data visibility, off-site backup, immutability, and air-gap solutions across organizations. These requirements dramatically increase both costs and management complexity, stretching IT resources thin.
This realization inspired us to pursue a more ambitious vision: to unify all the essential elements for modern data protection into a seamless system built from the ground up, rather than assembled through piecemeal integration. It combines backup servers, software, and storage with essential security features, including immutability, air-gapping, and backup verification, all paired with a transparent and reasonable pricing structure that sets it apart from any existing enterprise backup solutions.
The result is ActiveProtect.
Resolving The Simplicity Illusion
When vendors discuss simplicity, they typically refer to the ability to backup multiple sources with a single software solution or centralized management across multiple servers through a unified interface. However, this only addresses surface-level management complexity. The entire IT procurement process for data protection remains lengthy and complex - from initial survey and price comparison to proof of concept, procurement, and ongoing service and contract maintenance.
Through extensive customer engagement, we've identified that organizations often struggle with a fundamental challenge: sourcing hardware and software separately to piece together their data protection systems. For instance, determining the optimal hardware configuration and settings for a chosen backup software requires significant time for tuning since these aren't pre-configured during product design. Performance assessment adds another layer of complexity. Even when vendors like Veeam provide recommended specifications, budget constraints often force organizations to explore alternative configurations. This can lead to extended procurement times, as each configuration requires detailed testing and validation to ensure it meets performance requirements. Organizations commonly find that recommended specs don't always deliver the expected results, adding further time to deployment as they seek adjustments and compatibility solutions across multiple vendors.
This fragmented approach incurs hidden costs in both integration and ongoing maintenance, issues that ActiveProtect addresses with its fully integrated solution.
ActiveProtect addresses these issues through its integrated approach, combining hardware and software engineering into one solution that automatically applies optimal settings upon deployment. Unlike DIY solutions that require separate security updates and individualized evaluation processes, these setups often rely on third-party computing servers and repositories, such as those from Dell or StoreOnce in the case of Veeam. This reliance creates a significant blind spot, as the primary solution provider may not be fully aware of vulnerabilities within third-party systems. Even a seemingly minor flaw, when linked with others, can become a critical security risk, making such systems not only harder to detect vulnerabilities in but also significantly slower to respond to potential threats. In contrast, ActiveProtect streamlines maintenance by consolidating updates across the entire system.
When replacements are needed, ActiveProtect simplifies the process with HDD migration, avoiding the extensive reconfiguration that many standalone systems demand. In addition, unlike backup software vendors that rely on costly third-party repositories to enable advanced features, ActiveProtect integrates these capabilities natively. With built-in functionalities like source-side deduplication and WORM technology immutable encryption, it achieves optimal storage allocation, enhances performance, and significantly reduces the workload for IT personnel, eliminating the need for external dependencies.
Redefining Ease of Use
While ease of use is universally emphasized, Synology sets a distinctly higher standard. Our customers consistently tell us that Synology's interface is genuinely user-friendly and intuitive, requiring minimal familiarization or training for effective use. This is crucial because the hidden costs of training IT staff on complex interfaces, obtaining certifications, and managing staff retention are substantial.
The traditional approach requires IT professionals to spend weeks or months learning new systems, obtaining and maintaining certifications, navigating complex deployment procedures, and managing multiple management interfaces. For example, solutions like Veritas heavily depend on backup experts who must master command-line interfaces and Java-based operations, making recovery procedures and compliance testing nearly impossible without specialized expertise, and this knowledge is often lost when certified staff leave the organization. While most vendors offer comprehensive training programs, this often increases vendor lock-in and restricts enterprise flexibility.
ActiveProtect's unified management portal offers comprehensive visibility and control across the entire backup infrastructure, from on-premises to remote sites and cloud repositories, allowing IT teams to execute complex tasks through a single, intuitive interface.
Unique and Transparent Cost Structure
The current market structure helps explain why costs remain high. With complex licensing models from vendors like Veeam and Veritas, calculating costs becomes challenging. For example, Veeam calculates by workload: a VM counts as one workload, a PC counts as three, unstructured data on object storage, NAS, and file shares is billed in 500GB increments, and Microsoft 365 is billed per user. This complexity makes cost estimation difficult, especially as protecting a single VM or Saas accounts requires additional licenses, potentially leaving gaps in backup coverage if licensing limits are exceeded. Veritas, on the other hand, uses source data size for capacity licensing, which can prevent backups if data usage spikes unexpectedly, making budget planning even more uncertain. These factors collectively drive up costs, often making cost-effective solutions inaccessible for enterprises.
Unlike other vendors that charge extra for premium features, ActiveProtect enables organizations to perform backups entirely license-free. This includes essential functionalities such as source-side, cross-side, and global deduplication, immutability, air-gapping, and backup copies. Centralized management for up to three backup servers is also provided at no additional cost. For deployments managing more than three backup servers in a cluster, customers can choose to purchase a CMS license, which is based solely on the number of servers within the cluster. This straightforward and transparent pricing structure allows organizations to scale their protection strategies efficiently while maintaining predictable costs.
Synology's Vision for Modern Data Protection
With ransomware threats at an all-time high, data security should be a fundamental capability accessible to all enterprises. Synology's vision has always been to innovate through our integrated hardware and software development capabilities, rationalizing costs through a single-vendor model to democratize IT management.
Through ActiveProtect, we deliver unique advantages through pre-configured hardware-software integration and rapid deployment capabilities. The unified management interface simplifies daily operations, while our transparent licensing model ensures a predictable total cost of ownership. This approach enables automated configuration with optimal settings applied during deployment, unified management through a single interface for all backup operations, and streamlined licensing based solely on the number of backup servers under management.
Author: Jia-Yu, Liu, Executive Vice President of Application Group of Synology
