Spicy Bytes with Synology: Hot Wings, Hotter Takes on Data Protection

The idea behind Spicy Bytes is simple: put smart people in front of increasingly dangerous hot sauce and see what happens to the conversation. Our take on the iconic Hot Ones format, the Wasabi TV series pairs real business questions with wings that get progressively harder to ignore.

For this episode, we brought Wasabi's VP of North America Sales, Tom “Boomer” Phillips, together with Will Davis, VP of Sales and Marketing at Synology, to Fenway Park for a conversation about data protection, AI, and storage strategy. What followed was part business insight, part endurance sport. Here are the highlights.

Backup is no longer a plan B

For a long time, backup meant: keep a copy somewhere, restore it if something breaks. That thinking hasn't kept pace with how cyber threats actually work now.

What Boomer and Will described is an environment where mid-market companies are absorbing the targeting pressure that used to fall on large enterprises. AI-optimized attacks running at scale have changed the economics for bad actors. Smaller organizations are now worth hitting in volume because the cost to attack them has dropped significantly.

The implication for backup infrastructure is significant. An attacker sophisticated enough to use AI isn't going in blind, hitting production systems and hoping for the best. They're patient, they move laterally, and they look for recovery options to neutralize before deploying a payload. Will put it plainly: preventing people from getting in is harder than it ever has before. That means the architecture around what happens after they get in matters just as much as perimeter defense.

AI is doubling the data problem, and most companies aren't ready

Will dropped a stat mid-wing that deserves attention: feed one gigabyte of data into an AI platform, and it generates an additional gigabyte in return. Running AI workloads doesn't just consume storage; it multiplies it. Factor in multiple backup copies, and companies are looking at 3-4x their original storage footprint.

What's compounding the problem is that companies are being asked to scale AI investment at the same time IT budgets are under pressure. The instinct to make concessions on redundancy, to skip the second copy, is exactly the wrong response to a moment where data volume is accelerating.

The Synology ActiveProtect appliance was built with this reality in mind. As an all-in-one hardware and software solution, it removes two of the most common friction points in backup deployment: complexity and unpredictable costs. Paired with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it gives MSPs and IT teams a predictable, scalable path that doesn't require rearchitecting every time the data footprint grows.

Your old data isn't dead; AI just gave it a second life

Boomer shared a story about a financial services firm that issued a moratorium on data deletion across all subsidiaries. Why ban data deletion? Because data sitting in legacy systems and antiquated data lakes, data earmarked for deletion because it no longer served an obvious compliance or operational purpose, suddenly had differentiation value when viewed through the lens of AI.

Data that organizations spent years deciding wasn't worth keeping may now be the raw material for AI-driven insights that competitors don't have access to, simply because those competitors cleaned house.

A lot of that legacy data lives on systems that weren't designed for the performance demands of AI workloads. Will made the point directly: AI interaction requires low latency and high performance. If the infrastructure can't meet that bar, the data sits there unused regardless of what it's worth.

The bottom line

The conversation kept returning to the same pressure point: IT teams are being asked to do more with less, at the exact moment the threat landscape is getting harder to manage and data volumes are increasing.

What the Wasabi and Synology partnership is built around, and what came through clearly across all ten wings, is that the complexity and cost barriers that used to make enterprise-grade data protection inaccessible to mid-market companies are largely solvable. MSPs are a big part of how that happens: they bring the local expertise and relationships that turn simple, integrated technology into something customers can actually act on.

The full episode covers even more ground, including how ActiveProtect's licensing model changes the economics for partners, and what Covert Copy, an innovative new take on the virtual air-gap, unique to Wasabi, looks like in a real deployment conversation.