71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their biggest challenge. One reason is that customer requirements continue to diversify—from deployment preferences and budget constraints to compliance and recovery requirements. Maintaining separate backup platforms to address these needs is rarely practical.
As a result, deployment flexibility has empowered MSPs to grow. The ability to support different customer needs with a single data protection platform allows service providers to expand their market share without sacrificing operational efficiency.
ActiveProtect: Flexible hardware options for every need
ActiveProtect is Synology’s all-in-one backup appliance designed to simplify cyber resilience through tightly integrated hardware and software. The ActiveProtect portfolio includes the DP300 Series desktop units, the compact 1U DP5000 Series, and the high-capacity 2U DP7000 Series, enabling MSPs to support everything from lightweight edge deployments to large-scale centralized backup services via a single platform.
DP300 Series: Lightweight edge deployment
The DP300 Series is designed for lightweight edge deployments and customer-side backup scenarios. It serves as an ideal local backup appliance for branch offices, remote locations, and SMB environments. Despite its compact footprint, it delivers the same enterprise-grade software capabilities as the rest of the ActiveProtect portfolio, providing reliable protection without requiring significant infrastructure investment.
DP5000 Series: Flexible for customers and MSPs
The DP5000 Series serves a dual purpose. It can be deployed at customer sites to protect environments with larger data volumes and meet high performance requirements. It can also be deployed by MSPs as an entry-level platform for Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offerings. Its balance of affordability, scalability, and enterprise-grade protection makes it an ideal starter device for service providers.
DP7000 Series: Large-scale MSP data center deployment
The DP7000 Series is designed for large-scale MSP and centralized data center deployments. Primarily deployed within MSP environments, it offers the highest capacity and performance in the ActiveProtect portfolio and can serve as a centralized backup platform for multiple customers. With the highest management capacity across the entire product line, it also works as a centralized platform for customers with multiple on-premises backup servers, providing unified control from a single console.
ActiveProtect appliances are available in multiple capacity options across each series. For detailed specifications, please click here.
Tailored deployment options for various customer needs
ActiveProtect offers multiple appliance options and supports various deployment models to meet diverse customer requirements.
MSP-hosted centralized deployment
With this deployment model, customer workloads are protected directly with an MSP-hosted ActiveProtect appliance located in a centralized data center. Depending on service scale, MSPs can choose between the DP5000 and DP7000 Series, both of which provide the performance and scalability needed to deliver BaaS and DRaaS offerings.
By serving multiple customers from a centralized platform, MSPs can maximize their resources by reducing idle capacity and share critical resources, such as disaster recovery infrastructure, across multiple tenants. This helps lower operational costs while simplifying service delivery and management.
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Suitable for: Customers with limited IT resources and those who prefer not to maintain on-site backup infrastructure.
Client-hosted deployment
For customers with demanding backup and recovery requirements, ActiveProtect appliances can be deployed directly at customer sites, while backup copies are replicated to an MSP-managed environment for off-site protection and disaster recovery.
For the secondary backup copy, customers with disaster recovery requirements can replicate data to higher-performance ActiveProtect appliances such as the DP5000 or DP7000 Series, creating a dedicated off-site recovery environment for disaster recovery. If the customer only needs a secondary backup copy rather than full DR capabilities, data can instead be replicated to a Synology NAS, or to cloud storage services such as Synology C2, S3- compatible storage, and Wasabi—giving MSPs a lightweight, low-overhead way to provide off-site protection.
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Suitable for: Organizations that require the highest level of data protection, combining fast local recovery with off-site copies for disaster recovery and business continuity.
ActiveProtect: Built for simplicity, reliability and profitability
Flexible deployment is only the first step in winning customers. MSPs still need a platform that simplifies operations, strengthens resilience, and supports profitable growth.
Simplified operations at scale
Unlike other backup solutions that require separate hardware, software, and storage setup, ActiveProtect is a pre-configured all-in-one appliance that allows MSPs to avoid lengthy procurement and compatibility validation, enabling fast customer onboarding.
After deployment, Synology ActiveProtect continues to reduce operational effort through automation. For example, SaaS accounts are frequently added or removed as employees join or leave an organization. With auto-protection capabilities, the system automatically protects new accounts and excludes retired ones, ensuring up-to-date protection in dynamic customer environments.
ActiveProtect also helps MSPs verify recoverability. Built-in backup verification automatically validates recovery readiness and records the verification process as a video, making it easier for MSPs to prove backup reliability to customers without manual restore testing.
ActiveProtect supports SNMP, allowing MSPs to track appliance health and key system information through their existing monitoring workflows, improving visibility across distributed deployments.
Built for Business-Critical Resilience
Operational simplicity should not compromise security. ActiveProtect includes cyber resilience capabilities across the entire portfolio, such as one-click immutable protection that prevents data from being modified or deleted before expiration. Click here to learn more about ActiveProtect WORM technology.
To ensure recoverability, ActiveProtect includes built-in disaster recovery testing. Backups can be automatically verified in an sandboxed environment, allowing MSPs to validate recovery readiness without impacting production systems.
Reliability extends beyond software. For ActiveProtect DP7000 or DP5000 Series, redundant power supplies and network redundancy eliminate single points of failure, helping ensure backup services remain available during hardware or network disruptions.
Higher Service Margins
While expanding your customer base, ActiveProtect helps improve service margins by reducing both infrastructure and licensing costs.
On the infrastructure side, SURE (Synology Unified Reduction Engine) technology combines source-side and server-side deduplication to eliminate redundant data before and after transmission, reducing both storage consumption and network traffic. As data volumes grow, ActiveProtect’s tiering functionality further helps control storage costs by automatically moving older backups to cloud storage, allowing MSPs to retain more data without adding cost.
ActiveProtect also improves profitability through its appliance-based licensing model. Unlike solutions that charge per user or protected device, MSPs can expand protection coverage without increasing subscription costs, resulting in predictable operating expenses. Based on publicly available pricing, ActiveProtect can deliver up to 240% higher profit per Microsoft 365 user account compared to traditional per-user licensing models.
*Note: Actual profitability may vary depending on customer mix, pricing, bundling, and service delivery model.
Beyond licensing savings, ActiveProtect includes advanced cyber resilience capabilities such as built-in disaster recovery testing at no additional cost. MSPs can package these capabilities as premium managed services, enabling flexible and profitable service offerings. Learn how MSPs can monetize these features with ActiveProtect.
Interested in ActiveProtect? Contact us to get started.