CBA Design Studio
「Synology's solutions made it possible for us to scale our IT systems as we grew, and we're quite satisfied with the cost-benefit ratio. With our new solution, we've reduced access and permission support requests by 50% while achieving significant monthly savings on backup and identity management.」
Filippo Di Giovanni - Design Director and IT Manager
The Company
CBA Italy is the Italian branch of CBA international, a global branding consultancy with 300 consultants spanning 11 countries. CBA Italy was founded in Milan in 2008 with a staff of four branding experts and has steadily grown to over 40 employees. As part of the greater CBA network, CBA Italy is capable of simultaneously managing complex projects across multiple markets. Clients include Nike, Nestlé, Coop, and Sanpellegrino.
The Challenge
CBA Italy used a mix of systems and services designed for small businesses. As business grew, these systems could no longer scale to match the size of their business and were no longer cost-effective. Their IT also required continuous manual intervention, with employee onboarding, permissions editing, and (manual) backup management taking a lot of time. The fragmented nature of the solutions posed a potential security risk, as it increased the possibility of oversights exposing the company to cyberthreats.
CBA Italy needed a comprehensive solution that would be easy to configure, could automate day to day tasks, and would provide seamless integration with their existing workflow. It also needed to meet strict standards for data management, security, and threat protection, while simultaneously reducing overhead expenses.
The Solution
Better data management and protection
CBA Italy found that Synology's integrated on-premises and cloud-based solutions were ideal for their needs as a growing consultancy, allowing them to maintain their workflow, scale flexibly and cost-effectively, and bolster their IT security.
As their new main file server for over 30 TB of shared data, the company deployed a 12-bay Plus Series tower server. The DS2422 offers up to 218 TB of raw storage and advanced data management tools in a compact and silent chassis, without requiring a server room or dedicated rackspace. Leveraging the integrated backup solutions available in Synology DSM, they added two layers of data redundancy in line with the 3-2-1 backup strategy to provide maximum ransomware and disaster protection.
For their on-site backup, CBA use Synology Hyper Backup to duplicate all data and configurations on their primary file server to an 8-bay Plus Series tower server. Thanks to block-level incremental backup, data deduplication, and compression, Hyper Backup helps minimize storage consumption and cut backup times, while configurable rotation policies allow for automated deletion of older backups.
Completing CBA's backup strategy, off-site copies are created in a two-stage process to ensure minimal impact on operations. Using Snapshot Replication, near-instantaneous snapshots of all data on the file server are copied to an identical 12-bay server without affecting availability of system resources. Snapshots are then uploaded from the secondary server to C2 Storage, Synology's dedicated off-site cloud destination for backups, to provide maximum redundancy.
Secure centralized user management
CBA Italy opted to use Synology C2 Identity to improve their identity management along with their control over resource and service access. Synology's cloud identity and access management (IAM) service lets organizations unify control of and provide single sign-on for user accounts, Windows and Mac devices, and dozens of cloud applications.
With C2 Identity, CBA Italy centrally manage employee credentials across multiple on-premises and cloud systems, providing them with access to services and resources appropriate for their position. Additionally, they use C2 Identity Edge Server to host a local directory server node, providing low-latency access to on-premises resources. Support for managing macOS systems through Jamf Pro and regulating employees' Microsoft 365 use has helped significantly streamline IT management.
The Benefits
These Synology solutions for data and identity management have made it possible for CBA Italy to grow while keeping their IT compliant, cost-effective, and secure.
C2 Identity has given IT staff the ability to manage their existing solutions and services while automating many of their user management tasks, allowing them greater security, smoother access to resources, and also significant cost reductions.
Synology DSM on the DS2419+ ensures CBA Italy's employees have fast and reliable access to centralized data with secure access management.
Hyper Backup helps CBA's IT staff automate backups of snapshots to a secondary system, all while using compression and deduplication technology to save on storage use.
C2 Storage provides secure storage in the cloud for backups made with Hyper Backup, completing CBA Italy's comprehensive 3-2-1 data backup strategy.
Snapshot Replication gives their organization essential security against cyberthreats with snapshots that can be created and restored nearly instantly. By storing these snapshots to a second system and keeping secondary copies in the Synology C2 cloud, they are further protected with critical off-site redundancy.
Recommended Models
- DS1821+ × 2
- DS2422+ × 2
Recommended Features
- Hyper Backup
- Snapshot Replication
- C2 Storage
- C2 Identity