Kathy Gibson reports from Synology Open Day in Cape Town – As AI becomes pervasive, there is increasing pressure on organisations to retain control of their data.
Mirian Lin, account manager at Synology, today introduced delegates to Synology’s Open Day in Cape Town to the AI-powered workplace enabled by the Synology Office Suite.
She points out that businesses are facing two big challenges as the embrace AI transformation,
“The first is cybersecurity,” Lin explains. “While third-party hacks have doubled, AI is making them harder for users to spot.
“The second is the escalating cost of productivity. As AI takes off, costs are becoming harder to predict.”
Businesses are responding to these challenges by bringing productivity tools back on-premise where they can keep full data ownership, secure collaboration and predictable costs.
The Synology Office Suite is a private cloud solution that helps organisations increase efficiency, security and productivity.
Because the applications are all housed on one Synology platform the business stays in complete control of all data, Lin explains. And more than 70 000 businesses are already using it, with more than 18-million individual users.
Collaboration
Synology Office Suite provides key tools for realtime collaboration, whether on slides, spreadsheets or documents.
Because it offers multi-format support, users don’t have worry about compatibility. They can work on documents in different formats, or bring them into the Synology Office Suite where colleagues can work on them together.
Communication
In businesses today, the key communication tools are email, chat, calendar and online meetings.
Synology brings them all together on one NAS.
Because email is traditionally hard to migrate, Synology MailPlus is allows for seamless migration that is secure and reliable, with efficient troubleshooting.
“It feels familiar from day one,” Lin explains.
In addition, Synology ChatPlus and Meet are private AI-powered communications platforms that adapt to the way an organisation works, with superior security in an on-premise offering.
Because Synology Office Suite is a single platform, chats, meeting and webinars are all held in one place.
“This helps people to stay on top of their work, while transcripts and summaries are stored securely in one place,” Lin says.
AI is built in
Businesses want smart AI that they can control. But as Lin explains, AI transformation is not an overnight event.
“It is a journey,” she says. “But tools like Synology Office Suite can help them to move faster, then unlock the value in their data, and then realise smarter automation through agentic AI.
“With Synology Office Suite, you can turn data into a searchable AI knowledge base.”
Some examples include using Synology ChatPlus to bring AI translation everyday conversations; using Synology Meet to generate AI meeting minutes; or letting MailPlus help to draft, polish and publish emails.
Meanwhile, Semantic Search helps users to search the Synology drive to find the right file.