Synology’s multifaceted NAS is legendary in the business and prosumer spaces, but many organisations just need the very best backup features without any distractions or complications. Synology has responded with an entirely new, purpose built backup appliance called ActiveProtect which manages, optimises and protects everything including Databases, Physical and virtual machines and SaaS that are potentially spread across fragmented, multisite and multi-vendor environments. It even handles backups of backups (with powerful deduplication) in one, centrally managed, dedicated solution. Here’s what you need to know.
Data protection is the top priority
The combination of cyberattacks and AI poses a greater threat to our data – and subsequently our organisations – than ever before. Backups remain a core solution but it’s important to evolve your strategy from Disaster Recovery into one of Cyber Recovery. What does that mean?
Early backups fundamentally mitigated system crashes. Then they moved to protect against (non-malicious) disasters where backups were not the target and the data impacted was usually at a local (or regional) level. Now, however, increasingly complex and sophisticated, AI-fuelled cyberattacks mean the scope has changed: attacks are now commonly maliciously targeted towards an organisation’s data (including backup and recovery systems) in a way that compromises restoration. The new paradigm has evolved from causing ‘simple’ service unavailability to comprehensively affecting the data integrity, confidentiality and reputation of an entire enterprise and supply chain.
It’s essential to know the common blind spots associated with cyber recovery. After all, many organisations don’t just have fragmented hardware environments, they utilise multiple data storage, application and software vendors which, themselves, have multiple rules and requirements (like being locked into AWS S3, for example). Coordinating an overarching backup strategy across multiple vendors is impractical for many organisations. Managing the management of such a backup environment, across multiple sysadmins and power users, is another problem altogether.
A complete solution
ActiveProtect is a purpose-built backup appliance that provides simplicity in evaluating the ideal setup – you only need to know the size of the data being backed-up. Synology has calculated all hardware requirements for you.
ActiveProtect is a centralised backup solution which backs-up all of your endpoints, including PCs and Macs, physical servers, virtual machines and cloud applications across all of your business’ infrastructure across multiple sites. It facilitates the management of all data across those sites, including backup servers, remote storage and hypervisors. Plus, it helps you set-up bespoke protection plans and archiving for all of it. Client-side encryption is provided to protect backup copies before they are stored. WORM storage enables you to store backup copies in remote storage with retention periods set to prevent deletion or modification during the data retention period.
There are also granular user delegation controls to lock access to (high visibility) Monitoring, Restoration, Backup and System Management (with cluster architecture oversight) which have been designed with security as a priority. This means access controls come with options for MFA, SSO and 2FA sign-ins and all user activities and changes are logged. The initial set-up can take just 10 minutes.
ActiveProtect will also manage your firewall settings and create automatic rules, isolating backups and limiting access to specific ports and IPs.
Ironclad backup, quick restore
Immutable backups can be isolated across multiple storage devices including air-gapped storage with (flexible) time locks to ensure nobody can access them out of scheduled hours or until it’s safe to do so.
Automatic protection is provided for virtual machines based on host/cluster/folder organisation where the VM resides; cloud service policies are automatically assigned based upon the group to which the account belongs; and physical devices get backed-up using Connect Keys that are set-up during deployment.
ActiveProtect’s Fast Backups system enables Snapshots with Fast Block Tracking and Time-Consistent Point-in-Time management. It automatically checks for backup integrity, adds backup verification and even plans for recovery drills! This all facilitates instant restoration to production sites.
Other benefits include data deduplication, self-healing storage pool backups that use hot spares and self-configuring (new) hard drives; sandbox environments; and other multiple, diverse restoration capabilities.
Monitor your backup infrastructure with a single plan
Management is simplified with a single plan required for even the most fragmented of multisite organisations. Everything is scalable across multiple platforms including Synology C2, AWS S2, Synology NAS and new ActiveProtect appliances.
The latter includes hardware that ranges from the minuscule dual-bay, DP320 and larger DP340, four-bay boxes to the high-density, rack-mounted DP7400 units that can maintain up to 83.5TB each. The DP7400 is built as the main backup server, while DP340 and DP320 are designed for edge backups, differentiated by the size of the backup source.
With ActiveProtect it’s possible to create and manage custom protection plans, view up to 150,000 workloads and perform backups and retrieve data from an offsite location on one platform. You can monitor up to 2,500 sites and view your entire backup infrastructure – including primary backups, backup copies, tiered, and archived data – no matter where your data is located.
Act now before disaster strikes
With so many breaches occurring every week worldwide – whether caused by an organisation’s own failure or that of a third-party partner/contractor – and with mainstream media outlets regularly featuring them (and any other significant failures) on the evening news, data integrity and disaster recovery must no longer be the primary consideration of businesses.
The bad guys and their AI-fuelled, automated toolkits will do their best to cause as much damage to your organisation as possible, whether it’s for profit, malice, political reasons, or a combination of all three. As such, you need a holistic approach to backup that prepares for the worst but isn’t overly complex to implement and manage. That’s why, whatever size organisation you’re part of, you need to investigate Synology ActiveProtect right now.
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