Organizations face rising threats, shrinking budgets, and scarce cyber talent. Building resilience starts with smarter, simpler data protection.
It can be intimidating to consider how true the statement “cyberthreats are not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’” is. In its most recent Annual Cyber Threat Report, the Australian Signals Directorate noted an increase of more than 12% in calls to its Cyber Security Hotline compared to the previous year, with an average of one report every six minutes.
And when attacks succeed, as they often do, the inability to restore critical systems swiftly can compound losses, disrupt customer trust, and even threaten organizational survival.
Foundry’s Security Priorities Study 2024 identified strengthening the protection of confidential and sensitive data as the top priority for security leaders. However, while businesses are increasing their spending on security. Gartner forecasts a 14.4% increase in overall security spending for 2025; budgets still need to be justified and defended, and the competition for scarce cybersecurity talent is intensifying, even as the attack surface and complexity of IT environments continue to widen.
Consequently, organizations need solutions that deliver resilience without excessive complexity or cost.
The budget and skills challenge
Even when security leaders recognize the importance of recovery, execution often lags behind ambition. Two roadblocks dominate: constrained budgets and the ongoing shortage of skilled cyber professionals.
For many IT teams, maintaining a full suite of enterprise-grade backup and recovery solutions has traditionally meant costly licensing models, complex integration work, and dedicated staff. In smaller or mid-sized organizations, those barriers can feel insurmountable.
According to Joanne Weng, International Business Director, Synology, data protection does not need to be prohibitively expensive, nor should it require a large team of specialists.
“We built ActiveProtect Appliance with this in mind, as an on-premises and purpose-built backup appliance that streamlines backup management while adhering to best practices for backup,” says Weng.
She also cautioned against assuming that backup servers are invulnerable.
“Backup servers are not immune to ransomware, encryption threats, and data breaches. Countering these risks requires a 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy, where the extra ‘1’ ensures an immutable copy that cannot be altered, and the ‘0’ represents verified zero errors through integrity checks,” explains Weng.
“ActiveProtect Appliance enables this through immutable protection and air-gap functionality, all while keeping management seamless so recovery can be done efficiently and on time.”
To overcome the skills shortage, Weng highlights how ActiveProtect Appliance is centralized. This allows the console to oversee 2,500 servers and up to 150,000 workloads, and for the IT admins to respond to remote events immediately.
“For example, if a subsidiary is hit with a ransomware attack and its services are no longer running, IT admins from the headquarters can immediately check on the status of the subsidiary’s backup servers,” says Weng.
Even if the subsidiaries’ local backups have been affected, the central team can quickly restore data from off-site backups at the headquarters to maintain business continuity.
The five pillars of modern data protection
How do organizations assess if their data protection strategy is truly resilient? Weng outlines the five essential pillars from Synology’s Enterprise Data Protection Checklist.
- Workload Protection – safeguarding diverse environments, from hypervisors and servers to endpoints and Microsoft 365 applications.
- Backup Strategy – building resilience with longer retention, immutable backups, and automatic protection for new workloads.
- Recovery Readiness – ensuring rapid restoration through instant recovery options, sandbox testing, and fine-grained file or VM restores.
- Infrastructure Reliability – strengthening business continuity with geo-separated copies, a 3-2-1-1-0 approach, and proven disaster recovery processes.
- Access & Oversight – maintaining security with role-based privileges, centralized authentication, detailed logging, and proactive alerts.
This framework provides security leaders with a clear benchmark for evaluating their capabilities and identifying gaps. Crucially, it broadens the lens from prevention alone to a full-spectrum view of resilience.
The experience of Toyota Vietnam illustrates the stakes involved. The automotive giant faced challenges in protecting rapidly growing volumes of operational data, from vehicle service records to dealership management systems. With cyberattacks against manufacturers on the rise, Toyota Vietnam needed a way to strengthen both security and business continuity.
By deploying Synology solutions, Toyota Vietnam built a reliable data protection framework that ensured critical information could be backed up and restored quickly when needed. The implementation improved operational efficiency, reduced risk exposure, and, critically, reduced data backup costs by 75%.
Toyota’s case highlights how enterprises can future-proof their operations by embedding robust, easy-to-manage data protection into their broader security strategy. Too often, security leaders feel they must choose between affordability, simplicity, and robust protection.
“It shouldn’t be that way. With the right architecture that checks the five pillars, enterprises can achieve industry-grade resilience without the prohibitive costs or staffing requirements of legacy approaches. We believe that solutions like ActiveProtect Appliance embody that philosophy, designed to integrate seamlessly into existing environments while reducing both complexity and cost,” concludes Weng.
Contact Synology for a comprehensive cybersecurity assessment and to discuss your environment with their solution experts.
