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Synology is penetrating the enterprise market without losing sight of SMEs and enthusiasts. However, the broader focus requires a different approach with a greater focus on trust, which
Synology is penetrating the enterprise market without losing sight of SMEs and enthusiasts. However, the broader focus requires a different approach with a greater focus on trust, which explains why the NAS maker also makes drives and SSDs today.
There are many IT enthusiasts who have a NAS at home, and in most cases this NAS is from Synology. “We don’t forget the prosumer,” says Miléna Laurent, Product Manager Benelux at Synology. She recognizes that Synology has grown thanks to these enthusiasts, but Synology’s ambition today goes even further.
“Locally, the business segment with medium-sized businesses and companies has been just as large and even larger than the B2C segment for several years,” she says. “In the third quarter of last year, SMEs and enterprises together accounted for two-thirds of sales in our region.”
Synology hopes IT professionals who have a Synology NAS at home will consider the brand when looking for a professional solution. To make this possible, Synology today creates customized products for business users. The focus is increasingly on large companies.
“We really work to develop our products at an enterprise level,” explains Laurent. “We have a solid plan of action.” In her opinion, three pillars are crucial for a breakthrough in the enterprise segment: “Companies want security, reliability and management.” Synology is actively working on all three.
“In the area of security, we have been actively working with the security community since 2016,” she says. “We have a bug bounty program and a response time of just eight hours for security issues.”
We have a bug bounty program and a response time of just eight hours for security issues.
Miléna Laurent, Product Manager Benelux Synology
Additionally, the operating system of Synology’s storage products, DiskStationManager (DSM) 7, is designed for security. Laurent points out secure default settings that, among other things, disable standard administrator accounts. Other security mechanisms such as MFA have also been available for some time.
In addition to safety, reliability plays a major role. “We tightened our quality assurance procedures, but quickly realized that stability requires control. If a customer had problems and they were due to a hard drive problem, we couldn’t help. That’s why we started making discs ourselves.”
Synology provides the firmware for these drives and ensures that they are fully compatible with the NAS products. Anyone purchasing NAS devices or servers that Synology targets the enterprise market can choose from a limited list of compatible drives, all manufactured by Synology. These drives are no more expensive than comparable models from the competition and, above all, are intended to offer reliability.
“The software and hardware are completely integrated,” she says. “This guarantees stability and also ensures that our engineers can solve a problem independently if it does arise.” Synology now also sells its own SSDs in the same design. The manufacturer also offers flash servers in the enterprise segment, but today more entry-level models also offer space for an SSD cache.
With security covered and full control of the hardware and software stack for stability and support, all that’s left is management. Laurent: “With Active Insight we have introduced a management platform that works at scale. Active Insight lets you centrally manage hundreds of Synology servers. Administrators can set snapshots and restore points, deploy updates, monitor backups, and more. Active Insight even offers ransomware detection.”
Active Insight runs in the cloud and is accessible to administrators from anywhere. Although the solution is suitable for managing NAS devices and servers on a large scale, it can also be used by an SMB or consumer. The basic functionality is free, which once again shows that despite its focus on enterprise, Synology does not want to lose sight of the SME market.
In fact, part of this management is the ease of use, which, according to Laurent, sets Synology apart from the established names on the market. “DiskStations and RackStations are easy to use.”
Belgium is of course an SME country and that is where Synology is currently making the most progress. “Although the country also has interesting companies,” says Laurent. “We work with big and small names and certainly want to penetrate further into the medium-sized market in the near future. We adapt to the customer.”
She is impressed by the scale of the discussions in the Benelux countries. “The people here are surprisingly tech-savvy. They know what they’re doing, more than in many other places. This applies not only to IT experts, but also to end users.”
And what about the prosumers who made Synology great? Laurent is clear: “We never want to give up B2C, but rather offer a solution for every type of customer.” Whether you are an IT enthusiast, an SME or a company, we are there for you.”
Source: IT Daily
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