Synology's pushing into ANZ enterprise storage & backup market

Data is everywhere. That truth underscores the growing demand for robust storage, backup and security solutions - needs that Synology insists it can meet. From global enterprises to prosumers, the Taiwan-founded company has been pushing its hardware and software to handle the ever-increasing volume of information. Several members of the Synology team recently discussed these advances, explaining how they strive to safeguard data from the smallest family home to orbiting space stations.

"The total amount of data managed by Synology has about reached 520 exabytes," said Michael Chang, Regional Sales Manager at Synology. "Apple's iCloud is catering to around 2 billion active devices - that is around 512 exabytes." "So, put this into perspective, the data managed by Synology is roughly equivalent to the scale of Apple's iCloud."

He explained that Synology does far more than simply offering storage. In his words, "Synology is not just a storage hardware vendor. We provide data protection, video surveillance and business productivity solutions." The platform aims to ensure reliability for its clients, including both corporate and governmental bodies.

Chang highlighted that "more than half of the Fortune 500 companies are our happy customers." Synology has consistently topped certain industry rankings, he said, and boasts a 99% customer recommendation rate and a 4.7 out of 5 review for data storage and data protection solutions. He went on to share real-world use cases:

"Synology solutions are being used in critical mission operations," he explained. He cited offshore exploration, where the company's NAS devices are deployed on unmanned autonomous vessel fleets to manage surveillance, and even a space agency, which built a space station as large as two football fields, carrying out low-gravity experiments and generating lots of data. Since it's hard to expand storage in space, they use Synology's private cloud solution to regularly sync data back to Earth — a setup they've trusted for years.. "They can't afford to send IT onsite to a ship or to space," he added. "So what they need is something reliable, something that would get the job done."

Chang offered another example involving a European police department, which needed a private, secure and encrypted chat solution to avoid the risks of data leaks. "Not even Synology has access to their chats," he said. "Everything is encrypted and secured." He also referred to a well-known German football club whose entire annual revenue hinges on short, intense bursts of activity - "90% of their annual revenue during a 17-day event," he said, making downtime unacceptable. As a result, the club relies on Synology's high-availability solution with one active server and one passive server.

Turning to Australia, Chang recounted meeting with representatives from Tourism Australia in Canberra: "They have scattered data over in the cloud, in tape, in external HDDs. When they talked to us, they said, 'What do you have?' We have a highly scalable petabyte storage solution." After implementation, Tourism Australia consolidated its data, saving costs and improving efficiency.

He also mentioned UNESCO, which uses Synology's centralised backup solution and virtualisation across 70 countries, and Toyota Vietnam, an important production site in Asia-Pacific. "We proposed that with a Synology backup server, you could utilise our integrated solution," Chang said. The result, he claimed, was a 50% reduction in the company's backup costs.

Asked about Synology's positioning, Chang outlined the company's spectrum of offerings: "We have a lot of products and solutions. For the prosumer, we have a two-bay NAS. SMB, SMEs... enterprise, we're also touching that portion of the market," he said. He further explained that Synology solutions appear across federal government agencies, large space initiatives, semiconductor industries and more.

Synology's well-attended events in some 20-plus countries allow the company to gather feedback to drive product improvements, Chang noted. Artificial intelligence (AI) is part of its development strategy, starting in 2017 with image recognition, followed by the creation of a machine learning department, and then more recent efforts in generative AI. "We have deployed some internal tools," he said, referencing failure prediction of hardware, chatbots for website recommendations, and image recognition in surveillance solutions.

Between 2023 and 2024, AI has been integrated even more deeply, according to Chang: "It has helped us reduce the average cost of support to 0.01%," he said. He added that machine translation has cut monthly expenses by 87%, and that AI has freed up to 50% of Synology's human resources for other tasks. While the company does offer cameras and related hardware for surveillance, Chang made it clear that the emphasis remains on data management and security.

Chang said the Australian and New Zealand markets have seen notable traction, especially among enterprises and the public sector. "Public cloud is still there, but one of the concerns is data sovereignty," he said. This shift has given Synology opportunities to provide "integrated solutions for hardware and software, without excessive license costs."

He then handed over to Jasmine Chiu, ANZ Country Manager at Synology: "We were founded in 2000," she said. "We already have a high penetration rate in the consumer market, and we're seeing more and more opportunities in the enterprise sector." This, she explained, is why the company introduced a new product line in January - the Synology Active Protect Appliance - aimed at enterprise customers with more complex data backup and recovery needs.

Chiu detailed the growing issues in cybersecurity, especially in Australia, which she called "the 11th most affected country worldwide" in terms of data breaches. "The average cost of data breaches in Australia reached a record high of 4.26 million Australian dollars," she said.

Three key challenges often hamper businesses, she explained: management complexity, reliable restoration, and backup efficiency. "The backup data itself can actually be the target," she said, emphasising the need for robust defences such as immutable protection, offline backup and rapid restoration. Synology's approach includes an option for physical air gaps: "It can disable network ports, and it can even shut down the whole hardware," she said, "so if anything happens, the data can be well protected."

Another significant difference with the new appliance is its dedicated software and hardware combination, designed to accelerate backup performance. "The cloud email backup speed is seven times faster than active backup for Microsoft 365 used on our NAS," she said. Furthermore, "users can save up to 50% of data storage space usage" thanks to global source-side deduplication.

Synology's integrated pricing model charges on a per-node basis - not per workload, Chiu clarified. "We offer three free licences in every backup cluster," she said. "So if they are three or fewer devices in one backup cluster, you only pay for hardware costs." Additional licences only come into play with the fourth device and beyond, which she said can lead to over 90% savings on recurring costs compared to rivals.

The Synology team emphasised their view that the company's integrated software is highly competitive: "Our strongest forte is software," Chang said.

Addressing misconceptions, one speaker noted that Synology has grown beyond small-scale consumer solutions. "We sort of started our company as a prosumer or small and medium business solution, so enterprises often perceive us as just a storage vendor," she said. "However, there are actually many solutions that business users can utilise without costly licensing fees."

Recalling the product launch in January, Chiu highlighted the positive reception from Australian businesses: "Australia was actually where we made our very first sale of this new offering," Chang said. Feedback focused on how simple the appliance is to set up within minutes, making it "hassle free," because customers do not need to juggle multiple vendors.

Finally, Chang stressed Synology's in-house security team, a dedicated group of "hackers" who constantly test products to ensure vulnerabilities are patched quickly. "We have a bounty program to incentivise hackers to hack our system," he said. "We have a 24-hour response time to patch things up."

He concluded with the reminder that absolute prevention is impossible, so reliable restoration is paramount. "It's not a matter of if," he explained. "It's about whether you're able to recover your data."