“After adopting ActiveProtect, we achieved stronger cyber resilience alongside significant operational simplification and up to 90% time reduction,” Toyota Motor Vietnam, one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers, shared this after years of using tape backups.
Due to long-term retention needs, Toyota previously relied on tape backups for its scalability. However, as their production data kept growing, traditional tape workflows became harder to manage. This led Toyota to begin its journey toward modernizing their data protection operations.
What tape saved in storage costs, it cost in time
Manufacturing industries experience rapid data growth as production scales, driven by large amounts of CAD files, production logs, and long-term operational records. Toyota faced annual data growth of 10% to 30%, creating challenges with storage capacity, data management, and recovery requirements.
For example, Toyota frequently needed to add new tapes — sometimes every one to four weeks — just to keep pace with storage demands, as tape backup lacked deduplication capabilities. This also impacted backup operations, resulting in backup processes that could take days to complete.
Management was also a major challenge. Toyota shared that “operations and management rely heavily on manual work and take a lot of time.” Maintaining isolated off-site backups required significant manual effort, including tape removal, transportation, and rotation. As a result, recovery could take multiple days — a major concern for Toyota, as they could not afford prolonged downtime during cyberattacks.
Learn more: Relying on tape backups in 2026 isn’t enough to build your cyber resilience
At the same time, real-time visibility across sites were limited, as Toyota described, “blind spots were common.”
These manual, time-consuming operations made Toyota realize that, as their business grew, their data protection strategy needed to evolve toward a more automated and streamlined approach.
Turning to ActiveProtect for operational simplicity
“After comparing various solutions, ActiveProtect, Synology’s all-in-one backup appliance, caught our attention with its cyber resilience and operational simplicity.”
Toyota established separate protection strategies for critical data and daily operational workloads. Around 50 critical virtual machines and servers were protected with immutable backups and off-site replication to align with the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy, while another 150 virtual machines were backed up and replicated across five remote sites.
Although the environment consisted of multiple backup systems, Toyota could centrally manage distributed environments through a management server, allowing teams to monitor backup progress, copy status, and storage usage in real time through a single dashboard.
Read here to learn how to build a long-term retention strategy with ActiveProtect.
After adopting ActiveProtect, Toyota experienced a new level of efficiency across storage, recovery, and operational management.
Up to 80% less storage consumption
Synology’s SURE technology combines incremental backup and global deduplication capabilities and were highlighted by Toyota. They found it “very helpful to use” as it significantly reduced redundant data across workloads. As Toyota described it, “Storage growth dramatically flattened.”
While tape was originally adopted for its low cost and long-term retention capabilities, Toyota found that modern data protection technologies could utilize storage far more efficiently. By adopting ActiveProtect, Toyota achieved storage reduction rates of up to 80%, significantly improving storage efficiency.
By eliminating large amounts of redundant data, not only did Synology’s SURE technology reduce storage consumption but also accelerated backup operations. Backup operations that previously took days with tape could now be completed within hours, even at scale.
RTO reduced from days to minutes
Recovery times improved even more after using ActiveProtect. With ActiveProtect’s instant restore capabilities, workloads could be rapidly restored directly from the backup repository, eliminating the need to retrieve, transport, and fully restore physical tapes.Toyota was now able to reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) from days to just minutes.
Recovery verification became significantly faster as well. With ActiveProtect, recovery testing can now be performed within the built-in sandbox environment in minutes instead of days, making the process on-demand, non-disruptive, and automated.
As a result, Toyota accelerated recovery while gaining greater confidence that critical systems could be restored reliably when needed.
Modernize isolated off-site backups with automation and visibility
In the past, tape backups were valued for its physical isolation and tamper-resistant nature, but maintaining them often required significant manual effort.
With ActiveProtect, Toyota modernized how isolated off-site backups were managed. After backups were completed, the system automatically replicates backup copies to a remote server while maintaining immutability on both copies. Toyota was able to set custom, automated isolation policies as the system is able to automatically switch back and more between connected and isolated states. All in all, by using ActiveProtect, Toyota was able to experience the same level of isolated and immutable protection, with significantly better operational efficiency.
Learn more about ActiveProtect’s WORM and air-gap protection.
Compared to tape backups, ActiveProtect delivers far more than operational simplicity. Centralized real-time visibility enables teams to monitor backup and backup copy environments through a single interface. Toyota shared: “We now save several hours every week while significantly reducing operational overhead with ActiveProtect.”
Not only did this centralized dashboard improve daily operations, it also simplified audits. All necessary audit information could be centrally collected through a unified platform. As a result, audit preparation was reduced from 2–5 days with multiple IT staff to just a few hours.
More than a backup solution: Building a culture of confidence
As Toyota modernized its data protection operations, tasks that once required significant time and effort became simpler and more efficient. Not only did this improve daily operations, but it also shifted the team’s mindset toward a more proactive and confident approach to data protection.
Recovery testing was one example. In the past, tape-based testing was cumbersome, time-consuming, and could potentially damage physical tapes. As a result, testing was typically performed only quarterly or annually and was sometimes skipped altogether.
By contrast, after adopting ActiveProtect, recovery testing became significantly simpler and more efficient, enabling Toyota to conduct tests on a weekly or monthly basis. Toyota shared:
“Teams are now more confident and willing to test regularly — a cultural shift from ‘avoid testing’ to ‘test regularly.’”
For Toyota, the right data protection solution delivered more than backup efficiency. It simplified operations, strengthened resilience, and increased confidence in recovery readiness across their IT team.
Start modernizing your data protection with ActiveProtect. Consult us today.