Mike Chen: Cyber Resilience Has Become a Top Priority for Saudi Organizations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

1- As Saudi Arabia accelerates digital transformation across government, enterprise, and emerging sectors, how are data protection priorities changing for organizations in the Kingdom?

Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation is fundamentally reshaping how organizations think about data protection. It is no longer treated as a narrow IT function, but as a core business continuity and operational resilience priority. As government services, enterprises, smart infrastructure, and emerging digital sectors become increasingly data-driven, organizations are now expected to ensure that information is not only secure, but also accessible, recoverable, and governed in line with evolving regulatory requirements and data sovereignty expectations.

This shift is evident across industries in the Kingdom, where businesses are placing greater emphasis on resilience, recovery readiness, and uninterrupted operations. Organizations are looking for solutions that can balance robust security, operational simplicity, scalability, and cost efficiency. As a result, data protection conversations are evolving beyond backup alone to focus more broadly on cyber resilience and rapid recovery from disruptions.

To support these evolving requirements, Synology’s data protection appliances, the DP-series, are designed to deliver comprehensive cyber resilience capabilities. In addition to offering air-gap protection at no extra cost, the solutions enable organizations to regularly rehearse disaster recovery scenarios. This helps businesses implement a complete 3-2-1-1-0 data protection strategy across their IT environments.

2- With AI adoption increasing, what new challenges are organizations facing in managing, securing, and recovering their growing volumes of data?

AI adoption is introducing a new layer of complexity for organizations because data is no longer just growing in volume, it is also increasing in strategic importance. This fragmented landscape makes it significantly harder to maintain full visibility, enforce consistent governance, and ensure effective access control, backup integrity, and recovery readiness.

This is why AI readiness must go hand in hand with resilience. Organizations now need stronger data classification frameworks, centralized visibility across backup environments, immutable backup copies, tested recovery workflows, and clear governance policies that define how data is stored, accessed, and restored.

Ultimately, AI-ready infrastructure must also be resilient infrastructure. If data cannot be secured, scaled efficiently, or recovered quickly after a cyberattack, outage, or operational disruption, organizations risk impacting the very AI-driven operations they are investing in. The focus today is not simply enabling AI to use data, but ensuring organizations can retain visibility, control, and protection of that data throughout its lifecycle.

3- How is Synology supporting organizations in strengthening data protection, recovery readiness, and cyber resilience as data environments become more complex?

Synology helps organizations address the growing complexity of modern data environments by simplifying and centralizing data protection across increasingly distributed IT landscapes. 

With solutions like ActiveProtect, Synology offers a purpose-built backup appliance designed to unify data protection within a single platform. Through ActiveProtect Manager, organizations can consolidate backup, recovery, management, security, and scalability in one system. It also incorporates features such as air-gapping, backup immutability, role-based access controls, and built-in ransomware protection. ActiveProtect Manager 1.2 further improves backup visibility and supports more flexible management of backup infrastructure across different deployment scenarios.

The Synology High Availability solution is specifically designed for small and medium-sized businesses with limited IT resources. It provides a cost-effective and reliable way to minimize service downtime while offering enterprise-grade features tailored to common business scenarios and data protection requirements. Our Active Backup for Business (ABB) solution helps protect business workloads across PCs, Macs, physical servers, file servers, and virtual machines. It enables administrators to manage backup tasks from a centralized dashboard and supports features such as bare-metal recovery, global deduplication, incremental backups, and backup task management. Furthermore, Synology ActiveProtect appliances (DP-series) are purpose-built backup solutions designed for centralized backup, recovery, ransomware resilience, and large-scale workload protection.

With these solutions, we enable organizations to implement at least a 3-2-1 backup strategy, ensuring protection against hardware failures, ransomware attacks, and physical disasters. In the best-case scenario, organizations can achieve a complete 3-2-1-1-0 strategy, further strengthening resilience against advanced cyber threats through immutable backups and rigorous automated recovery testing.

4- How can organizations in Saudi Arabia balance cloud adoption, data sovereignty, and on-premises control while building more resilient data infrastructure?

The most effective way for organizations in Saudi Arabia to balance cloud adoption, data sovereignty, and on-premises control is to stop viewing cloud and on-premises environments as competing options. Instead, they should be treated as components of a broader hybrid data strategy.

A key starting point is data classification. Organizations need to assess their data based on sensitivity, business criticality, regulatory requirements, and recovery needs. Highly sensitive or regulated data may require stronger local control, while cloud platforms can support scalability, flexibility, remote access, and additional backup copies. 

Meanwhile, cloud computing has become popular over the years because of its convenience, rapid scalability, and ease of deployment. However, as digital environments become more complex, concerns around data security continue to grow. As a result, many organizations are now reassessing how much of their infrastructure should remain in the public cloud and are increasingly investing in private cloud and on-premises environments to regain greater operational control.

Today, the priority is building resilient environments where businesses maintain ownership of critical data, create multiple protected copies, and ensure rapid recovery capabilities in the event of cyberattacks, outages, or operational disruptions.