CrowdStrike offers the Falcon Endpoint Protection suite, an antivirus and endpoint protection system emphasizing threat detection, machine learning malware detection, and signature free updating. Additionally the available Falcon Spotlight module delivers vulnerability assessment with no performance impact, no additional agents, hardware, scheduled scans, firewall exceptions or admin credentials.
$6.99
per endpoint/month (for 5-250 endpoints, billed annually)
DiskStation
Score 8.9 out of 10
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DiskStation is a line of network-attached storage (NAS) solutions from Synology headquartered in Taiwan.
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Pricing
CrowdStrike Falcon
Synology DiskStation
Editions & Modules
Falcon Pro
$6.99
per endpoint/month (for 5-250 endpoints, billed annually)
Falcon Enterprise
$14.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
Falcon Premium
$17.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
I would highly recommend CrowdStrike Falcon to any organization serious about bolstering its cybersecurity defenses. The platform's effectiveness in threat detection, proactive mitigation, and scalability make it a valuable asset in today's ever-evolving threat landscape. Despite some learning curves and integration challenges, the return on investment and the overall security enhancement justify its strong recommendation.
The Synology DiskStation is well suited as a NAS solution, easy enough to mirror a Windows file server shares setup. Access to the Hyperbackup utility eliminates the need to purchase a tape backup solution. A portable USB drive can be used as the initial backup target. For air gap purposes can connect Hyperbackup to the various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP to copy backup data there. Utilizing it as a backup solution has also been great, instead of purchasing a tape solution, tapes and an offsite tape repository. Active Backup for Business is another excellent backup utility for physical servers, VMWare virtual machines, etc. Restoring files is fairly intuitive. Until Synology introduced the dual controller setup, using it as a SAN was less appropriate as there was occasional downtime when the controller had an issue but this was less important for the scenarios we were using it for. It would be more of a concern if we had used it for things that require more robust uptime requirements. Overall we are happy with the features of the Synology DiskStation.
Synology DiskStation offers lots of options for creating links to share files or request that some uploads files. It makes it really easy to just share a link that can have an expiration or a set number of times it is accessed.
We always had enough storage on our Synology DiskStation, we never had to worry about something being too big to upload or share.
Love how you can create folders that are shared and also have some that are private. This makes it so easy to have shared collaborations with coworkers or clients, but also allows you to have a private place to save things that only you need.
While BTRFS is a more advanced file system than ext4, it also is in a perpetual state of development, with many features not fully functional and a plethora of bugs. Synology has managed to overcome many of these limitations by placing BTRFS on top of a LVM, but there are much better file systems that Synology could have used, such as OpenZFS.
DSM's built-in backup software, HyperBackup, while robust, oftentimes runs into issues. Specifically, backups can be working fine for months or years, and then suddenly the backups will fail. Sometimes these failures can be resolved, but oftentimes the backups need to be completely restarted. Fortunately, even when the backup fails, the existing backups are still accessible, it is just that new backups can not be performed.
The underlying Linux OS provides significant benefits, but also adds a fair amount of complexity. Most of that complexity is wonderfully hidden by the DSM interface, but when certain problems arise, delving into the Linux command line is not out of the question.
Perhaps the biggest issue with Synology DiskStation is Synology's support. The issue isn't that the support is bad, but it can be frustratingly slow when dealing with a major issue. Synology does have a very active community that is always willing to help, but nothing beats first-party support.
Crowdstrike has a large suite of tools built for helping the engineers triage and respond to security event whenever identified. The ability to customize the security policies and implement more granular policies to different devices based on the functionality is unmatched. Crowdstrike provides so much of ability in a decent budget which ascertains the value for money or ROI.
It provides us with great ROI compared with other solutions. It is also a versatile product, having NAS and SAN product lines depending on the business requirement. Furthermore, the implementation of dual controller lines would allow us to consider it for more critical applications to supplement the more enterprise-level SAN solution. It also is a wonderful backup solution, having all the applications available after purchase of the appliance without the further need to purchase additional software or licensing.
I think it is a complete and very trustful XDR platform, with very few False Positives. It is very well supported by highly skilled professionals on all levels: from pre-sales engineers, Customer Account Managers and support engineers.
The Synology DiskStation is fairly easy to use, but maybe a challenge for those who not super IT savvy. With some trial and error, you can pretty much figure out how to configure the NAS the way you want it configured. I would say it is easy to use once it is set up and maintaining the device is likewise pretty straightforward as well.
Support is generally pretty fast and gets right to the issue. We haven't had to use them much, fortunately, but the issues and questions we've had are usually answered quickly. The customer success manager/account manager you're assigned will also follow up with you on a regular cadence to ensure you're getting the most out of the subscription. There's not a whole lot of room to improve, other than the general confusion about what is/what is not covered in custom packages you're subscribed to. The initial purchase took much longer because of a package name changes and realignments of different modules into those packages.
Unfortunately, the one time I've had to reach out to DiskStation support, it did not go well. My NAS appliance wasn't appearing on the network, and no matter what the support team tried, they could not get it back online. Instead of offering to send me a new unit, they told me to go buy a new one - obviously, this was a disappointing response and not very eco-friendly either! Fortunately, through some internet research of my own, and some ingenuity, I figured out I could restore my NAS to factory settings by removing all the drives and resetting. Only then did I realize I had a bad disk. I had to experiment for a while to figure out which one it was. Once I had done that, though, I was able to get the latest DiskStation loaded back on, no thanks to the DiskStation support crew. If notifications were rock solid, I suspect I would have caught the bad disk before it because an OS problem, but I never received a bad-disk notification.
There is limited amount of learning that can be completed in an in-person training available. In my opinion, the self-paced learning provided by Falcon portal is more useful over in-person training. The support from Falcon is great and useful to overcome difficulties, if any.
The training provided by Crowdstrike Falcon is complete in terms of the depth of technical knowledge and teaches the users about going through with the platform. There are lots of jargons for different tools that Crowdstrike Falcon has and this training teaches them all which helps in managing the platform better. Plus, the regular knowledge checks are also very helpful for the end user.
CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud-native architecture gives it an edge in terms of scalability, ease of deployment, and real-time threat intelligence updates. The user interface of Falcon is intuitive and offers clear visibility into our organization's threat landscape. Our team felt more comfortable navigating Falcon's dashboard. CrowdStrike Falcon's API and integration capabilities meant we could easily incorporate it into our existing tech stack, enhancing our other tools. Falcon's seemed more flexible for our specific needs.
Synology DiskStation packs a punch with the latest and greatest feature set which goes above and beyond many other vendors. It allows for a turn-key solution to cover almost every use case in the SMB market leaving other vendors behind.
It has helped us go from printing things out to file them away to going 100% digital with our files and documents because we have a secure place to save stuff.
We are organized. I can't really put a value or number to how amazing this is for us, but when we deal with so many documents and files it can be so hard to keep things organized, but with Synology DiskStation, we have all our files in specific places and it helps us stay organized and definitely saves time because things are so easy to find.
One negative thing has been that our Synology DiskStation relies on us either being plugged into the network in the office or having a strong internet connection at home. With the pandemic and everyone working from home, we have had "outages" where we were not able to sync our data, and things were lost and we had to start over.
