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Taiwanese technology company Synology says its new line of enterprise data backup appliances, which can help protect against cyberattacks, is now available in Australia.

The firm’s ActiveProtect line launched in January, promising to combine data backup, recovery, and management in an all-in-one appliance.

The new series includes devices with storage capabilities between a 5TB desktop model suitable for branch office backup tasks and an 83.5TB rack-mount appliance as a centralised management server, with built-in software allowing organisations to have up to 150,000 devices or accounts backed up across their infrastructure.

Synology has so far deployed around 520 exabytes of data storage worldwide and aims to become the world’s largest private cloud platform in the next five years, the company said.

The firm’s existing clients include numerous Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tourism Australia and several Australian government entities and schools.

Hackers targeting backups

Amid increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks and data breaches, ActiveProtect appliances utilised increased security for backups, which were also being targeted in cyberattacks, Synology said.

The company has introduced immutable backups — preventing malicious or accidental deletions or changes to files — as well as air-gap security measures which physically isolate backups to reduce the risk of impacts from attackers.

Synology's ActiveProtect range is now available in Australia. Photo: Synology / Supplied

Michael Chang, Synology’s regional sales manager for the Asia-Pacific, said the company had witnessed hackers getting “really, really creative” of late.

“We’re seeing more sophisticated attacks, not just on the front-end but also in backups,” he said.

“That’s why we have introduced immutable backups and air-gap functionality.

“The core philosophy is that we want to make sure that if anything happens, you’ll still have a clean copy to restore and minimise operation downtime.”

Jasmine Chiu, Synology’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand, said the air-gap feature allowed enterprises to schedule a period to physically isolate their backup data.

“So even when the network is corrupted, our data can stay intact,” she said.

The integrated ActiveProtect Manager operating system protects up to 2,500 backup servers at once, including endpoint devices and infrastructure such as virtual machines, databases and servers, and cloud services like Microsoft 365, Synology said.

Synology's Michael Chang says hackers are getting especially creative. Photo: Synology / Supplied

The company has a global security incident response team, as well as a group of in-house ethical hackers who stress-test its products and services.

“We’re the first NAS [network-attached storage] company in the world to have these kinds of in-house hackers,” Chang said.

“We have two teams, red and blue — the red team continually attack our own products and solutions, and the blue team monitors for security threats.

“We also have a bounty program — more than 200 researchers have joined our bug bounty program so far, and we’ve awarded more than $US270,000 for their efforts.”

The shift to on-premises backups

Numerous companies, organisations, and governments are cutting costs in an uncertain economic environment, leading some to move from public cloud providers to private on-premises solutions to both save money and secure their data, Synology said.

“Anything that happens to your data — any ransomware attack, any hacking, accidental deletion of your data — would be detrimental to your business, it’s catastrophic,” said Chang.

“Customers are looking for solutions that will help them safely store their data on premise, and not in the cloud, because they are afraid of leaks.”

The Synology ActiveProtect appliance DP340. Photo: Synology / Supplied

ActiveProtect’s ability to prevent duplication of backup data helped users to optimise the use of their storage space and minimise data transmission, Chiu added.

The system also allows for the rapid restoration of files and includes free user licenses for the first three devices, with further licenses charged per node instead of per individual backup workload.

The ActiveProtect line would benefit “any kind of organisation, whether its small-to-medium business to enterprise, and even to federal governments”, Chang said.

Synology is now working on solutions to help organisations transfer their public cloud data to on-premises systems, its representatives said.

This post is brought to you in partnership with Synology.