St. Nikolaus Hospital Replaces Legacy Backup Infrastructure with Synology ActiveProtect

St. Nikolaus Hospital Eupen is a mid-sized healthcare facility in Belgium’s German-speaking community, managing approximately 160 virtual machines and serving around 800 users. The hospital’s existing backup infrastructure relied on Veeam with replication to Wasabi cloud storage. While functional, this setup had become increasingly rigid and expensive as backup demands grew alongside the hospital’s expanding archive of medical records.

With Veeam licenses approaching renewal, the IT team saw an opportunity to re-evaluate. Their requirements were clear: a solution that was fully on-premise to satisfy strict GDPR obligations, simpler to administer without dependence on external vendors, and capable of enforcing a 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy—three copies of data across two media types, with one off-site copy, one immutable copy, and zero errors after backup verification. Ransomware resilience and long-term cost predictability were equally important considerations.

St. Nikolaus Hospital deployed a Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 appliance as its primary backup and recovery platform, with tiered storage to a Synology HD6500 for archival capacity. Together, the configuration provides hundreds of terabytes of managed backup storage, with the capacity to scale to petabytes as the hospital’s data footprint grows.

ActiveProtect Manager (APM), the software layer running on the DP7400, centralizes the hospital’s entire backup operation: protection plans, immutability policies, restore workflows, and disaster recovery processes are all managed from a single interface. The IT team can configure and execute restores directly, without external authorization or third-party tooling. Microsoft 365 backup is also handled natively within ActiveProtect, covering the hospital’s SaaS data alongside its on-premise virtual machines.

The deployment enforces a full 3-2-1-1-0 strategy. On-site, the DP7400 maintains primary backup copies with immutable snapshots. Tiered data flows to the HD6500, and air-gap policies ensure an additional layer of isolation. For geographic separation, the hospital replicated its entire ActiveProtect infrastructure to St. Vith Hospital, a fully isolated secondary site in Belgium. This off-site deployment guarantees that all critical patient data remains recoverable in the event of ransomware, hardware failure, or a site-wide disruption—and strengthens the hospital’s alignment with NIS2 requirements for operational resilience and continuity.

During a proof-of-concept phase, the hospital validated advanced restore scenarios including virtual machine recovery, database-level restoration, application-aware backups, and network resilience. The Synology team provided hands-on support throughout, addressing technical requests down to granular restore testing. The hospital found that ActiveProtect aligned closely with their established IT practices, making the transition from Veeam straightforward.

By replacing Veeam with ActiveProtect, St. Nikolaus Hospital eliminated recurring license costs and consolidated its backup hardware. Over a projected five-year period, the switch yields an estimated return on investment exceeding 200%, while shifting the hospital’s data protection spending to a more predictable capital expenditure model.

Day-to-day administration is significantly simpler. Restore operations that previously required multi-step workflows can now be performed directly through ActiveProtect Manager’s interface, and the unified console consolidates backup monitoring, protection plan management, and disaster recovery into a single view. This reduces administrative overhead and allows the IT team to respond faster when recovery is needed.

The fully on-premise architecture ensures GDPR compliance by design, with no patient data leaving hospital-controlled infrastructure. Immutable backups, air-gap isolation, and geographic replication to the St. Vith site collectively address the hospital’s obligations under NIS2 for resilience and business continuity. Centralized management across both sites through ActiveProtect Manager provides the IT team with a unified view of protection status, simplifying oversight even as the infrastructure scales.