Building an efficient data management infrastructure is crucial for businesses of any size. As organizations continue to increase the amount of data they acquire, consume, and share across departments and with the outside world, demand for flexible and reliable storage solutions is stronger than ever.
The coming year will see a series of updates to our DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system and Synology C2 cloud infrastructure that will deliver better scalability, dependability, and mobility to new and existing deployments. These will bring teams the agility to manage data at scale while maintaining the security and control they need to streamline operations and remain competitive.
Security upgrades and better performance
DSM 7.2 will enable businesses to further lock down and secure critical data, such as financial and healthcare records, legal documents, and other sensitive files that require long-term retention policies with tamper-proof data folders. These write-once-read-many (WORM) folders are resilient to accidental or malicious attempts to modify or delete data placed in them until a certain period of time has elapsed.
Figure 1: Store critical data in WORM storage, preventing files from being modified, overwritten, or deleted for a certain period of time.
Based on their requirements, users will be able to choose between two modes: Enterprise and Compliance. Enterprise mode is designed to provide businesses with flexibility, allowing system administrators to bypass protection and delete folders when necessary. This is ideal for protecting business-critical data not subject to legal requirements.
On the other hand, Compliance mode will bar anyone, including high-level administrators, from making any changes. Businesses operating in highly regulated industries, where the law often mandates specific data retention periods, can consider this stricter option to ensure compliance.
Similar protection can also be carried over to data and snapshots replicated between Synology systems, enabling immutable backups that protect against ransomware threats.
Building on individual shared folder encryption, DSM 7.2 will introduce encryption of entire storage volumes, making it easier for admins to protect systems against leaks due to physical theft or when systems are retired. Volume-level encryption will leverage AES-XTS, a block cipher mode designed as a more robust alternative to CBC and other methods, and will go beyond the current limit of 143 characters for file and folder names that exists for folder-based encryption.
On top of that, volume-level encryption will boost performance by up to 48% compared with folder-level encryption,1 and carry over support for automatic mounting using keys stored locally or remotely on KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) servers and USB storage devices.
Meanwhile, added support for SMB multichannel transfers will enable more efficient utilization of all network connections between servers and clients, significantly boosting SMB file transfer performance.2
Figure 2: By leveraging all available network connections, SMB multichannel increases the bandwidth available for file transfers.
More powerful file management and sharing
In Synology Drive 3.2, already out, mass deployment is easier than ever thanks to automatic logins through Active Directory credentials, as well as automated provisioning of backup and synchronization tasks. Starting from version 3.3, expected in the first half of 2023, admins will be able to leverage remote wipe capabilities to remove synchronized files from connected Windows or macOS clients, helping counter security risks posed by stolen assets.
Figure 3: Admins can immediately remove synced folders from devices that are lost or suspected to be stolen, minimizing security risks for the whole deployment.
These improvements make the large-scale rollout of file sharing through Drive faster while ensuring that admins are always in control. New safety features, such as custom watermark enforcement and file download blocking, further serve to keep Synology Drive among the most capable self-hosted file management solutions in the market.
For teams using Synology Office, Drive’s add-on for collaboration on documents, slides, and spreadsheets, a number of enhancements will make the platform even more capable. Better handling of password-protected files created in Microsoft Office will further simplify integration between departments using different solutions. At the same time, an improved revision mode will make asynchronous collaboration on documents smoother and more reliable.
Equipping teams to accommodate changing working habits, users can now create new files, edit on the go, and annotate PDF files directly in mobile browsers or the Drive mobile app.3 Together with features released earlier this year, including powerful new array formulas for spreadsheets such as IMPORTRANGE and XLOOKUP, these new releases aim to make Office an even more complete business productivity platform.
Complementing Synology’s on-premises solutions, C2 Transfer has helped customers perform secure file transfers in the cloud thanks to advanced identity validation with one-time passwords. To simplify working with less sensitive files, we are now introducing public sharing, allowing anyone who receives the right share link to access and download files (while still keeping detailed access logs).
For added security, users can apply dynamic watermarks to most files, for instance, adding each recipient’s email address to documents and images they download. This makes C2 Transfer an excellent tool for teams to provide customers and partners with less highly confidential items, such as company roadmaps and datasheets.
Figure 4: Provide convenient access while keeping your information safe by enabling dynamic watermarks and download restrictions when sharing files with others.
Another massive improvement to the C2 platform will be the introduction of a new sharing portal for the Hybrid Share service, which will enable secure and fast access to files through any browser, removing the need to make on-premises systems externally accessible.
Figure 5: Securely access your Hybrid Share folders through any browser if you have no access to the connected Synology systems.
Next-generation storage clusters
Next year, we will also launch Synology’s next-generation solution for converged file and object storage, addressing service and data availability metrics. In the new scale-out clusters, component-level redundancies are replaced by redundancies of one or multiple nodes. Designed from scratch as a true scale-out solution, these new file and object storage servers will offer superior scalability and reliability at an unmatched price.
Figure 6: Synology’s new scale-out infrastructure is designed to eliminate single points of failure that can result in downtime, aiming at up to 99.99% availability.
Higher-capacity storage with greater performance is necessary for applications such as high-resolution video surveying, AI training with large raw data sets, or building infrastructure files for extensive construction projects. Scale-out clusters will be considerably faster than Synology’s current largest solutions, with near linear performance scaling as units are added and maximum concurrent connections increasing with the number of nodes.4
Our first generation of scale-out clusters will support flexible, on-the-fly capacity expansion to up to 60 servers, supporting over 12 PB of effective storage, 60 GB/s sequential write performance, and 80,000 concurrent connections.4 But not only capacity expansion is made more efficient: System updates can be deployed in a rolling fashion, with systems performing each update sequentially while other nodes continue to serve users.
More coming up
With DSM 7.2 and upcoming upgrades for our entire range of solutions, we are committed to bolstering the capabilities of existing and new Synology deployments as we continue to introduce hybrid cloud innovations that bring together performance, scalability, and security.
If you are interested in what else we have in store for 2023, we invite you to watch the Synology 2023 AND BEYOND keynote for an in-depth look at our newest innovations in data management, data protection, and infrastructure security.
1. Obtained through internal testing by Synology. Compared to transfer speeds against encrypted shared folders. Actual performance may vary depending on the testing environment, usage, and configuration.
2. Obtained through internal testing by Synology. Actual performance may vary depending on the testing environment, usage, and configuration.
3. These new functionalities are currently only available for the Android app. An update for iOS is coming soon.
4. Obtained through internal testing by Synology using preliminary hardware and non-final software. May vary depending on development changes and testing environment, usage, and configuration.