Synology held its Annual Press Event 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, bringing together key findings from its survey on AI adoption among Malaysian businesses and outlining its Synology AI data infrastructure strategy for the year ahead. The event highlighted a significant gap between AI ambition and practical readiness, with data security, quality, and governance emerging as the primary barriers to sustained adoption.
Synology: Malaysia Acknowledges AI’s Benefits, Implementation Remains Difficult
Synology’s survey found that over 90% of Malaysian respondents consider AI-ready infrastructure important to workflow efficiency and productivity. Despite this near-universal recognition, the path to implementation is complicated by persistent data challenges.
Seven in ten respondents (70%) identified data security and privacy as their top AI adoption concern, making it the most frequently cited obstacle. Data quality and availability came in second at 42%, followed closely by scattered data at 40%. These findings point to a consistent need for organizations to establish a secure, accessible, and well-managed data foundation before AI initiatives can deliver lasting results.
Approximately 68.6% of Malaysian respondents prioritize hybrid or on-premises infrastructure, compared with just 12.5% who favor public cloud, indicating continuing preference for keeping business-critical data within environments that organizations can directly manage.
Cyber resilience confidence presents a more mixed picture – while 74% of Malaysian respondents say they are confident in their ability to recover quickly from ransomware while keeping backup data protected, only 26.4% describe themselves as very confident. A separate concern involves visibility into how AI tools handle business data, where nearly 40% of Malaysian respondents reported having no visibility into how data submitted to third-party AI tools is managed.
Synology is addressing these priorities through three focus areas: scalable data infrastructure, stronger cyber resilience, and productive AI adoption with greater control over business data. Its 2026 data infrastructure launches include the PAS7700, its first NVMe SSD storage solution designed for mission-critical workloads. The new-generation FS and RS series deliver improved performance over their predecessors for general storage requirements. DSM 7.4 introduces Synology Tiering and data reduction capabilities to help organizations use storage more efficiently.
On the cyber resilience front, Synology ActiveProtect appliances combine dedicated backup infrastructure with centralised management, immutable protection, and automated isolation. The updated ActiveProtect Manager 2.0 extends workload support to additional enterprise platforms including Nutanix AHV and Proxmox VE. A new 1U appliance, the DP5200, joins the ActiveProtect Series as a compact option for protecting diverse workloads without recurring subscription fees.
For workplace AI, Synology Office Suite provides an on-premises collaboration foundation with AI assistance for document revision, presentation content creation, and spreadsheet formula suggestions. Synology ChatPlus and Meet extend the collaboration experience to team messaging and video meetings. The DVA7400 surveillance appliance, also launched in 2026, applies AI to incident detection and search to help security teams investigate events more efficiently.
Looking ahead, Synology previewed upcoming scale-out storage and hybrid surveillance solutions designed to help enterprises scale as data volumes and operational requirements grow.
Pokdepinion: 90% say AI infrastructure matters, but only 26% feel truly ready – sounds about right for any tech trend in Malaysia.
