- Taiwanese company is bullish on NAS market and set to add more products to its pipeline.
- Synology is investing in better AI integration and plans to do so through predictive data analytics and automated incident response solutions to enhance cybersecurity and backup services.
Synology products are much easier to install and use when compared to its big peers in the market as their [peers] solutions are complex, APAC Sales Head for Synology, said.
Speaking to TechChannel News in an interview, Michael Chang said it is easy to train the IT staff with Synology products when compared to its peers.
“Synology provides easy plug-and-play solutions to install and the other key differentiator is that many competitors provide either software-only or hardware-only solutions, whereas Synology offers fully integrated solutions,” he said.
Moreover, he added that Synology’s licensing fees are more affordable than those charged by other competitors, thus representing a budget-friendly solution.
“Some companies don’t have strong IT skills but we make it as intuitive as possible and make it easy for them to manage in their infrastructure,” Chang said.
Synology is a Taiwanese company, started in 2000, which produces NAS (network-attached storage) products for data management functions alongside backup and storage solutions.
“When we started, we were focusing only on consumer segment and SMEs but now, we are also targeting enterprises as it provides huge business opportunities,” Chang said.
AI integration
Right now, the enterprise sector contributes about 20 per cent to the group’s revenues but he said that they launching new products and solutions to increase its market share.
“In 2025, we are targeting to increase our corporate clients’ share of the pie by another five per cent,” he said.
The company is going to launch VaaS (video as a service) on the cloud, new surveillance cameras, and scale-out storage solutions.
“We will be launching more AI solutions to increase productivity. Due to the emergence of AI, a lot of things have changed and productivity has increased. Synology is pouring money into better AI integration and plans on doing that through predictive data analytics and automated incident response solutions to enhance cybersecurity and backup services.”
In the future, he said that Synology NAS will become a database for companies to increase productivity.
Keeping an eye on cybercriminals
As the technology is advancing as well as cyberattacks, most companies have a second storage option in the cloud as a backup protection as they don’t trust the tech enough to keep their data in one place and on one medium.
For this, Chang said that they had identified this hybrid trend in the market for a long time and so “we had launched options such as on-premises as well as public cloud solutions.”
Even though Synology’s emphasis is on on-premise solutions, a big contrast to the cloud-focused services of companies like Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, Chang said that the requirement for storing data within national borders prevents government agencies and some other organisations from using cloud-based solutions.
“Every year ransomware attacks have been increasing which requires businesses to establish data security as their fundamental need. Synology launched the ActiveProtect Appliance because both security and scalability requirements in backup solutions have risen intending to enhance user-friendly protections and cyber defense capabilities.”
Biggest markets
ActiveProtect merges data backup software functions with servers and their repositories into one hardware system to make enterprise-level protection simpler.
The system design of ActiveProtect provides plug-and-play deployment capabilities which enables quick backup initiation within 15 minutes.
“The management system gives IT teams the ability to monitor and control large backup resource collections effectively,” Chang said.
Moreover, he said that they have dedicated hackers in their team to test their products for any vulnerability and also collaborate with other security experts in the market to reward them if they find any vulnerability in their products and solutions.
Chang said the biggest markets for Synology are North America and Europe but has identified SAARC and also the Middle East and Africa as growth markets.
He said the NAS market outlook is bullish as data volumes are increasing.
In 2023, the total NAS market achieved a value of $34.62 billion, according to Fortune Business Insights, and forecast the market value to expand from $40.33 billion in 2024 to $129.52 billion by 2032 at a yearly growth rate of 15.7 per cent.