COMPANY NEWS: Every week, Australian organisations experience cybersecurity breaches that are caused by either their own failure or that of a third-party. What’s more, the resulting damage isn’t limited to the internal havoc caused by intruders, it’s reputational – and that’s something that news outlets around the world love to amplify.

The cyber criminals know this and, armed with their Ai-fuelled, automated toolkits, they’ll do their best to cause as much damage to your organisation as possible, whether it’s for profit, malice and/or political reasons – even if it means deleting your backups.

Consequently, data integrity and disaster recovery must no longer be the primary business consideration. Backups remain the solution but the market needs to shift from having a Disaster Recovery mentality to one of Cyber Recovery. For this, organisations, of all sizes, need an holistic approach to backup that prepares for the worst but which isn’t too complex to implement and manage. They need Synology ActiveProtect. Here’s what you need to know...

Holistic Approach to Backup

Few technology users won’t know something about Synology’s legendary, multi-faceted NAS technologies. However, many businesses just need the very best backup features and, to this end, Synology has produced a new, dedicated backup management system called ActiveProtect.

ActiveProtect manages and optimises data, applications, software, operating systems and backups of backups, across fragmented, multisite and multi-vendor environments in one dedicated, centralised package.

It backs-up and manages the data from all your endpoints, including PCs, Macs and physical servers plus VMs, cloud applications, backup servers, remote storage and hypervisors, across all your business’ infrastructure, wherever it’s located.

Automated protection is provided for VMs based upon the host/cluster/folder hierarchy where they reside, cloud service policies are automatically assigned based upon the group to which the account belongs and physical devices get backed-up using Connect Keys during deployment. Everything is scalable across multiple platforms including Synology C2, AWS S2 and Synology NAS. Other benefits include self-healing storage pool backups (with hot spares and self-configuring hard drives) plus, sandbox environments.

Data transfer size can be reduced with Changed Block Tracking (CBT) and Resilient Change Tracking (RCT), improving backup performance and storage utilization.  This appliance also has built-in features to automatically checks for backup integrity, adds backup verification and even plans for recovery drills, should they be required. Diverse restoration capabilities facilitate instant restoration to production sites.

ActiveProtect also provides tailored protection plans and archiving and its data deduplication technology can reduce storage amounts by over 99 per cent. Client-side encryption protects backup copies before they are stored and WORM storage facilitates the management of backup copies in remote storage, using data retention policies that can prevent modification or deletion over a specified period.

Finally, immutable backups can be isolated across multiple storage devices (including air-gapped bare-metal storage), with (flexible) time locks, to ensure no one can access them outside scheduled hours (or when it’s safe to do so).

Simple Set-up and Management

If the above sounds complex, it’s worth noting that you only need to know the size of the data being backed-up as Synology can automatically work-out the hardware requirements that best suit you. This ranges from the miniscule dual-bay, DP320 and larger DP340, four-bay devices to the high-density, rack-mounted DP7400 units which can maintain up to 83.5TB each. Once installed, ActiveProtect can automatically configure everything in as little as 10 minutes.

Management is simplified by using a single plan for even highly fragmented, multisite organisations. All software and hardware arrives fully integrated, so there’s no need to test compatibility with third-party vendors.

Secure, granular, user-delegation (with support for SSO to meet MFA requirements ) can lock access to the extensive Monitoring, Restoration, Backup and System Management (with cluster architecture oversight) features and all activity is logged.

ActiveProtect will also restrict unauthorized IP access via the built-in firewall, with options to define allowed IP addresses, ranges, and subnet masks.

A New Paradigm

Backups have evolved from being the way to recover from system crashes and non-malicious calamities like natural disasters, accidents and hardware failures. In those situations, backups weren’t the target and the data impacted was limited to local or regional levels.

Cyberattacks have also evolved from being basic incursions, that affect service availability, into sophisticated, Ai-fuelled campaigns that maliciously target organisations’ data integrity – including their backup and recovery systems – as well as their confidentiality and reputation.

In this new paradigm, organisations need to protect themselves by treating backups as the foundation of Cyber Recovery. This means simultaneously protecting against ransomware and cyberattacks which can affect the entire enterprise and its supply chain. As such, not implementing an holistic backup solution like ActiveProtect, has become an act of sheer folly. Click here to find out more about Synology ActiveProtect, right now!

COMPANY NEWS: Gaming laptops are big, heavy and bulky and can’t do AI, right? Well, not anymore.

COMPANY NEWS: When a gaming laptop is so powerful that it can be used for industrial applications, it will turn heads everywhere and that is what MSI’s S-Tier laptop, the Titan 18 HX AI, will achieve in 2025.