Hi, I'm Derren. Thank you for tuning in to Synology 2023 AND BEYOND. It's always great to be able to share our latest developments with you all.
It goes without saying that this year has been a rocky year. Just when we thought we were finishing adapting to the new normal, new challenges and new disruptions came into play. But, with new challenges, come changes in demands and therefore new opportunities.
As leaders in data storage, here at Synology we empower our customers to better contain, manage, and protect their digital assets. In fact, we have worked with many of them to develop our solutions, taking in their feedback and observing market trends by analyzing their needs. What we have seen so far this year is that data management and protection are getting more challenging. Why is that, and what can we do to counter this trend? Today, having an efficient data management infrastructure is absolutely essential for business. Storage requirements are constantly rising, as we increase the amount of data we acquire, consume, and extract value out of.
That's not to mention the amount of data that flows within organizations and between them and their customers. To counter that, we keep improving our DSM operating system for better scalability, availability, mobility, and security, allowing our customers to easily manage, move, and secure petabytes of data. We also keep upgrading solutions such as Synology Drive, to make data sharing and synchronization more flexible and efficient.
At the same time, we are supercharging our hybrid cloud solutions to let our customers tap into on-prem NAS performance while enjoying the scalability and convenience of the cloud. One example is Hybrid Share, which provides not only on-demand storage expansion but also the ability to quickly bridge multiple sites together, achieving cross-site, cross-device data synchronization. Or Synology Active Insight, which makes large-scale infrastructure monitoring more intuitive and automated. Together, these services complement our hardware solutions, helping businesses to better face unexpected demands with increased agility. However, increasing data sizes, dynamic workloads, and distributed workforces all make deployments more susceptible to modern security threats, which are constantly evolving. To keep pace and protect critical data, businesses need to constantly evolve as well.
That's why the need for well-integrated and centralized data protection solutions is greater than ever before. Solutions that enable on-prem to on-prem backups with maximum performance and privacy. Or on-prem to cloud backups for convenience and cost effectiveness. And even cloud to cloud or cloud to on-prem. And that's what Synology Active Backup and C2 Backup are developed for. They are complete backup and restore solutions to cover all kinds of businesses' needs for data protection.
2023 is going to be an important year for Synology as we introduce a number of exciting new developments. Let's get started by having Katherine introduce our latest data management innovations. Hi, I'm Katherine. As you heard from Derren, Synology is becoming an increasingly dominant player in many IT fields, and the vast majority of our products are all powered by our DSM operating system. To date, Synology has shipped over 10 million storage systems across the globe powered by DSM. That makes it one of the largest and fastest growing dedicated data management platforms in the world.
It is perhaps not surprising that over 50% of Fortune 500 companies deploy our storage systems. Looking at the 18 years of history since DSM was first created, we have gone from small desktop systems all the way to servers supporting more than five petabytes of storage. Over the years, DSM has steadily become faster, more reliable, and more secure.
When we introduced DSM 7.0 last year, we massively revamped the platform, introducing innovations to help manage ever-larger deployments. Take Active Insight, our cloud-hosted solution for worldwide system monitoring. And other time-saving administrative improvements include significantly faster RAID rebuilds and the introduction of safe drive cloning and replacement. Earlier this year, with DSM 7.1, we added the ability to
perform full backups of Synology servers with Active Backup for Business, enabling administrators to centrally manage protection and quickly restore systems in case they encounter the worst. In terms of performance improvements, it's incredible how much DSM has been optimized in just the past three years, even when using the same hardware. And the same goes for data and service availability, with significant improvements to Synology High Availability, a measurable reduction in customer issues, and a lower rate of hardware failure, and at the same time as more Synology systems are sold than ever. And as security threats continue to emerge and evolve, we introduced new safeguards, such as Secure Signln, where we added U2F and FIDO2 support, to Active Insight, a powerful tool to keep your entire Synology fleet secure and in good health. Under the hood, we also added key improvements, such as upgrades to security protocols and better enhanced mechanisms. Because good security requires a multi-layer and multi-system approach.
After all, potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities are not limited to software. IT administrators, users, and company policies can all pose a threat to the safety of our systems. DSM is the sum of many parts, and it will be impossible for me to go through all the improvements. But today I can announce some of the main features that we're bringing to the table next year. In 2023, our core focus will be on two things: security and legal compliance, and convenient data transfer beyond devices. Let's start with the topic that many businesses probably care about the most: security and legal compliance.
Storing important documentation and records digitally is no different from storing them physically. When keeping financial and legal documents or sensitive personal data, users need to take into account different global requirements for how you should safeguard and for how long you should retain the data. In our next major DSM release, we'll be introducing full support for Write Once Read Many storage, also known as WORM. With WORM, shared folders can be locked down for a predetermined period of time. For instance, six years for transaction-related records under the US financial service regulations.
WORM on DSM will support two modes: Compliance and Enterprise. In Compliance mode, DSM will prevent anyone, even the highest-level system administrators, from being able to modify or delete the files for a set period of time. To do this, DSM will leverage a secure tamper-proof timer.
At the same time, we will also support extending the length of protection. This is great for businesses or organizations that must comply with certain policies. In Enterprise mode, you will have a bit more flexibility, where the primary system administrator can bypass this protection at any time. This makes it great for data that might be important to the company but doesn't necessarily have any legal requirements. WORM storage can also be used to strategically shield certain folders and their content from ransomware attacks.
The type of locking can be adjusted between immutable, which means no changes can occur, or in an appendable state, where the system only accepts additions to the files. This is important for file types such as logs, which are continuously written to in a sequential-like pattern. Finally, you can configure a grace period before the lock occurs.
This is great for files that may still be edited, such as certain spreadsheets or reports. Grace periods also provide additional convenience for teams, removing the need to only submit finalized files and enabling users to undo accidental transfers. Together with WORM, we'll also be adding volume-based encryption support to DSM. In the past, encryption at rest on the Synology system occurred at the shared folder level. This is great for flexibility, as it gives you on-demand encryption or decryption of specific folders.
However, we know that many businesses want something that is more global, a bit more convenient to enable or disable all at once. So, in DSM 7.2, we'll be adding volume-based encryption, allowing administrators to set up volumes and have all of the shared folders and LUNs encrypted together. Compared to shared folder encryption, volume-based encryption will not have file-character limitations.
The most significant requirement is, of course, that you would need to plan and pre-allocate the storage space you want to dedicate. In terms of performance, we're aiming for significant optimizations, showcasing a 48% uplift in sequential write performance when compared to previous implementations. WORM and volume encryption will enable our customers to better secure their systems against emerging threats, and also to better comply with local data retention requirements in a more convenient manner.
Both of these features will be made available in DSM 7.2, which is arriving in the first quarter of 2023. In addition to security enhancements, we will never give up the opportunity to introduce ways that enhance our system's performance. Also coming in DSM 7.2 is the long-awaited option to enable SMB multichannel support. Multichannel support enables significant speed-up opportunities for devices and clients with multiple network connections.
In properly set up environments, we can see linear speed increases by leveraging all available connections, even if they're mismatched. This will greatly speed up transfers across the board and help alleviate bottlenecks. Now, let's look at using the data stored on our systems.
Teams today depend on fast and efficient collaboration to get things done. To tell you more, I'm going to hand it over to our product manager Lewis. Thank you Katherine. Hi, I'm Lewis.
At Synology, we work every day to make data management more effortless for our customers. Outside of supporting NAS and SAN protocols, one of our most essential solutions for business users is Synology Drive. On our storage systems, Drive allows businesses to create their very own private cloud, with cross-platform data access, sharing, and more between PCs and mobile devices, directly from any browser. And all of this without subscription fees, with as much space as you want, and privately stored on your hardware.
To date, there are more than 900,000 active systems running Synology Drive, managing over 300 billion files. And we continue to see ever-higher adoption rates. We've been making continuous improvements to Drive, such as the long-awaited on-demand file synchronization feature for macOS systems, and native support for M-series chips.
Additionally, as our customers continue to store more and more files, we've put huge emphasis on improving the scalability and performance of the system. Last year, with Drive 3.0, we significantly raised the number of files that Drive can efficiently manage per system, and with Drive 3.2, we sped up file indexing by up to 10 times, drastically reducing waiting time when importing or modifying a large quantity of files. As for what's coming next, we'll be focusing on large-scale deployments, security and sharing capabilities.
Let's first take a look at deploying Synology Drive onto your endpoints. In the next major release, Drive will allow you to quickly deploy clients across all of your Windows-based systems, automatically sign in to Synology Drive using AD credentials, and also set up backup and synchronization tasks. This is a significant time-saver for organizations that use a single account to access their endpoints and file storage.
Or have support across Windows Active Directory, Synology Directory Server, and also C2 Identity. Next, we'll also be introducing remote wipe capabilities for systems with the Drive client installed. Even though the majority of mobile endpoints support full-disk encryption through BitLocker or FileVault, remote wipe adds a last line of defense in case someone gains access to the login credentials.
In addition to that, we'll also be adding watermarking support for files like PDFs and images, the option to block downloading, and collaborative file locking. File locking prevents conflicts when multiple people attempt to work on the same files that are synced to their local devices. We also know that many businesses and teams use Synology Office, our add-on for Synology Drive. Office enables simple, collaborative editing on documents, spreadsheets, and slides — a necessity for practically any business today. In Office, we revamped the way we handle file imports.
The new Office features improved support for more complex layouts. This reduces the number of manual adjustments users need to make after importing Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files. Additionally, we're improving support for importing password-protected, encrypted files, as well as usability improvements to revision mode, which is highly important when working together. Taken altogether, the Synology Drive-Office combo will continue to grow, supporting larger installations or becoming more capable and secure. But Synology's collaboration capabilities don't end there. Let's have Shelina take us through the latest developments in our cloud-powered solutions.
As a product manager for Synology's cloud solutions, it has always been interesting to propose ways to merge new technologies with our existing on-premises solutions. Last year, we launched Hybrid Share, a powerful new service that enables on-demand storage expansion for DSM, and a way to quickly connect, sync, and share data between systems. This was a key technology demonstrator for our traditional on-premises data management solutions, combining them with our C2 Storage cloud service.
Hybrid Share quickly gathered interest from our existing customers, with several large institutions piloting large-scale deployments. We believe that there is a great deal of potential in this solution, especially since Synology can tailor both DSM and our C2 cloud platform to complement each other. The first of these integrations was the release of global snapshots earlier this year.
This helped provide protection against threats like malicious ransomware attacks or even vengeful employees trying to delete everything off a server. In December, we'll be launching a standalone web portal that allows direct access to files stored in Hybrid Share folders. This is a great way for IT administrators to quickly view, pull, or upload data when they otherwise might not have access to the connected Synology systems. At the same time, we'll be adding the ability to directly share data with others from the web portal, making Hybrid Share an easy way to securely share documents with external parties without exposing your connected NAS.
With this hybrid architecture, Synology NAS plus Hybrid Share is going to become an even more powerful combination for managing and sharing data. Whether it is for teams that need high performance and reliable cross-site synchronization, or for a near-instant, on-demand storage expansion, Hybrid Share will definitely be a game changer. And speaking of sharing, for teams that are working with highly sensitive files, our C2 Transfer SaaS solution is your pick, and it is continuously getting improvements. Soon, instead of specifying individual recipients, you can also set up file sharing to anyone who receives the link. C2 Transfer will still request for the recipient's email address, which will then be logged to create an access record. This is great for files that don't require the level of security and privacy offered through identity validation.
Additionally, you can also apply dynamic watermarks to shared documents. For example, you can add email-based watermarks to company roadmaps that need to be shared with external parties. Each recipient will then receive the document with their own email automatically added, reducing the risk of data leaks. Later in 2023, C2 Transfer administrators will also get a more complete view on files sent by other employees, as well as the associated transfer settings. This will help with auditing and making sure that everyone adheres to the company or team's SOPs. Like all of our cloud services, C2 Transfer will continue to receive regular updates and service enhancements.
And as a part of C2, it is a great platform for us to rapidly iterate and fulfill our customers needs. So, in 2023, DSM is not only getting more secure and more efficient but our companion apps like Drive, Office, and services such as C2 Transfer and Hybrid Share are all getting massive improvements that help you better manage and share your files. Data management is such a crucial part of our everyday lives, and we're making sure you have the right tools to do that in a safe and convenient way. Moving on — Synology has had decades of data management experience already, but what we'll be releasing next year is going to be a true generational leap forward. Let's have Henning introduce us to our next-generation file server. Thanks Shelina.
Last year, we briefly mentioned the concept and benefits of scale-out storage. At a fundamental level, scale out is the next great leap forward for servers, solving one of the most important issues any IT faces: service and data availability. With DSM, we're already at the very edge of what can be achieved on an independent system level. In an SHA cluster, one device can unexpectedly fail and it will usually just take a minute or two for the entirety of all services to be fully back up and operational. But to lower that, we need to throw out almost everything and start from scratch, using a true scale-out solution. Our goal is to no longer be thinking about just component-level redundancies but being able to afford nodes, even multiple ones, going offline.
To do that, Synology will be launching our line of scale-out file and object storage servers next year. Our new lineup of scale-out systems will focus on three key aspects: scalability, availability, and unmatched cost effectiveness. Starting with scalability, these solutions are aimed at enabling our customers to scale beyond what existing systems can do today. At the top end, a fully populated HD6500 system can already store up to five petabytes of data.
That's not insignificant, and might be more than what most SMBs or SMEs can reasonably fill up. But for specific applications, including high-resolution video surveying, storage of large amounts of raw data for AI training, or building infrastructure files for large construction works, the need is always there for even higher capacity storage with even greater performance. Our next-generation file servers will address these needs with flexible, on-the-fly capacity expansion of over 12 PB in our first-generation scale-out cluster.
And, of course, performance can also be increased with each additional node. Based on preliminary hardware and software, a three-node cluster can achieve 4,065 MB/s throughput, and when scaling up to nine units, it can achieve over 10,000 MB/s sequential write. Compared to an HD6500 or SA3600, the new scale-out cluster is considerably faster with practically linear scaling as we add additional units. This also applies to the number of connections supported. We're estimating at least 4,000 concurrent user connections per every three nodes. As we aim at supporting up to 60 nodes with our first-generation scale-out cluster, this puts our fully maxed out system at over 12 PB, more than 60 GB/s sequential write, and over 80,000 concurrent connections.
In addition to supporting file and object storage, our scale-out cluster will support being configured as a Hyper Backup destination, and also run our Active Backup suite. This brings massive advantages for large deployments, namely the ability to scale in both capacity and processing performance, having a single domain deduplication across all nodes, which increases data reduction efficiency, and less management overhead, as you'll only be dealing with one unified interface for the entire cluster. We have more to say about backup later, so I'll just keep it at that for now. Moving on — the entire cluster is designed around resiliency. No single point of failure, no single event is going to cause an outage. That includes system updates, which can be deployed in a rolling fashion, where systems can take turns performing the update, all while the other systems in the cluster continue to serve data.
Updates, hardware maintenance, these will become fully transparent to users. Even for our first iteration of scale-out NAS, we are confidently aiming up to 99.99% availability, which means there will be less than an hour of disruption in an entire year.
And finally, to achieve this kind of scalability and availability, we're not going to forget one of our most important design philosophies: making IT accessible through class-leading cost effectiveness. By combining extreme scalability for capacity and performance together with system and data availability and unmatched integration with our backup solutions, Synology's next-gen NAS is absolutely going to be groundbreaking. Now, Synology is no stranger to dealing with cyberattacks and ransomware. They've become persistent threats that every IT team or CISO worries about.
On this front, we are advancing in two ways: through more comprehensive and capable backup solutions, and through more intelligent and proactive security. Let's have Travie be your guide to protecting your data. Thanks Henning. You know, I've always loved introducing our customers to our data protection solutions because of just how relatable and universal the concept is.
As much fun as it is to talk about performance, availability, or scalability, I find the topic of backup and restoration to be much more straightforward. How much data can you afford to lose? How much can you afford to pay to mitigate that loss? Well, everyone understands that backups are important but far fewer people know how to efficiently prepare, deploy, and fully test a backup plan. That's why Synology's suite of backup applications are designed to make backups simpler, more transparent and, most importantly, provide a dependable solution that businesses of all sizes can rely on.
It's hard to believe but it's only been five years since we introduced our Active Backup software for our systems. Today, the Active Backup suite has grown to cover all the core essentials of your IT infrastructure, securing everything from Windows and Linux to VMware and Hyper-V, even Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data. And the best part of all this is that it comes bundled with most of our mid-range and up systems.
There's no complex licensing, no renewals, no per-user or per-system licenses. It's really no surprise that we've continued to see our Active Backup platform grow tremendously. In fact, we're counting over 320,000 active installations of the Active Backup software. That breaks down to over 1 million endpoints and virtual machines, and more than 75,000 organizations protecting over 6 million accounts. And, the number of systems running Active Backup continues to grow at an amazing 34% YoY.
So, now that we got the statistics and key milestones out of the way, let's look at what we have in store. Well, one of the first things that you can expect is our macOS agent for Active Backup for Business. This will be out of Beta by the end of 2022 and will provide a long-awaited way for teams with macOS systems to get the same level of protection as their PC counterparts. More importantly, over the past year, we've worked with many of our partners to implement Active Backup at leading semiconductor designers and manufacturers, educational and financial institutions, and so much more. And we've really learned a lot, especially from the challenges that our service partners face.
One of the biggest to date is how to efficiently manage tens or hundreds of systems, where each might be running hundreds if not thousands of backup tasks. Given this, we believe that the future of backup will depend on well-integrated hybrid cloud systems for the performance, disaster recovery, and the flexibility needed to deal with the modern workforce, regardless of scale. To this end, in 2023 we'll be introducing our new cloud-based management tool for Active Backup, tentatively named Synology Backup Cloud. Synology Backup Cloud is going to be a powerful new system that links together our on-prem Active Backup with our cloud-based C2 Backup. This will give Managed Service Providers a centralized location to deploy, monitor, and manage all their backup tasks across various sites, multiple departments, or even different clients. With Synology Backup Cloud, IT admins can now get a bird's-eye view of all their backup tasks regardless of which device they're running on, including C2 Backup, our direct-to-cloud endpoint backup service, for a unified backup solution.
Our goal is to provide a single-pane management interface for both our on-prem and SaaS backup solutions. And this will immediately benefit the many organizations that already rely on both, for example, using C2 Backup exclusively for more mobile or remote teams, while using Active Backup for their on-prem servers, endpoints, or to secure their Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace data. You can expect Synology Backup Cloud to roll out in multiple stages, where initially we'll be focusing on more large-scale monitoring, kind of like Active Insight. More information about Synology Backup Cloud will be made available in early 2023 as we finalize the platform.
You know, data protection isn't just about the ingress of data, but it's also about its replication, and always adhering to a 3-2-1 backup strategy. And for Synology deployments, there's really no better tool for this than Hyper Backup. That's why, in 2023, we'll be adding support for immutable backups. This will give users the ability to create immutable backups, which are a necessary tool for dealing with ever-evolving ransomware and other advanced threats. And Hyper Backup will also support DSM 7's new full-system backup capability, which is currently being leveraged by Active Backup. This will make the complete protection of Synology systems even easier, for example, by sending those Hyper Backup tasks directly to the cloud.
Protecting your data with Synology is extremely simple, whether it's folder and file-level, bare-metal, or even SaaS. Backing up your endpoints in critical IT infrastructure is simple today and will be even simpler and more scalable in 2023, thanks to Synology Backup Cloud and tighter integration between our on-prem and C2 offerings. Keeping your Synology systems protected is also getting easier.
Currently, Active Backup already covers full-system backups, but Hyper Backup will make it simpler and a one-stop solution for sending data directly to off-site destinations such as our own C2 Storage. Synology's market-proven backup solutions give our partners and IT admins the flexibility to create plans that fit their environment and requirements, all while offering the most cost-effective solution on the market today. Now, let's hand it over to Cody to talk about what we have up our sleeves for part two of securing and protecting a modern business: infrastructure security. Thanks Travie. Data storage, management, and backups are some of Synology's most important solutions, and these are often the core necessities that any business would need. But modern requirements are more complex, requiring multi-layered security and many solutions to efficiently monitor and manage large quantities of devices, users, and services.
Infrastructure security is our final session but, in my opinion, it's going to be the most innovative one. We'll begin with a very familiar and comparably mature product: video surveillance. Surveillance Station is our comprehensive video management system for Synology storage systems and dedicated NVRs.
It's designed to tackle any environment, whether it's a huge warehouse, multiple buildings scattered across a campus, or thousands of stores in a franchise. To date, Surveillance Station is connecting over 2.3 million IP cameras across nearly 500,000 sites.
We're seeing a 30% YoY growth, as demand for better, clearer, and more convenient solutions are only rising. Earlier this year, we released our widely anticipated 9.0 update. With it, we pushed the capabilities of the platform even further.
We made it easier to deploy large-scale surveillance projects, such as those with thousands of cameras per site, for our partners and customers. Surveillance Station is now also easier to manage, thanks to expanded centralized management capabilities. We also introduced more flexible and convenient user interfaces, and multi-site, multi-floor display capabilities.
All with an aim to drastically reduce security teams' response times. At the same time, as a company that values a security and privacy-first approach to product design, we also introduced support for encrypted video streams, privacy masking, and a separate encryption scheme for protecting recordings against even compromised credentials on the system. We also introduced C2 Surveillance, a new C2 service designed to give our customers a reliable way to secure their camera footage. In the event of a system or site getting compromised, data loss could be minimized to just seconds, ensuring critical footage is retained for insurance, police work, or more. As the service has steadily grown more mature since release, we've added new plans based on customer requirements. The most affordable plans focus on recording only events, such as those triggered by motion, while the advanced plan, in addition to supporting higher resolutions and recording at full speed during events, will also provide condensed 24/7 recordings as a time lapse.
Finally, we also just added a new professional plan for customers that want to set up recording permanently to the cloud. With it, you'll get 24/7 recordings at full speed. All together, Synology Surveillance Station and C2 Surveillance make a powerful combination. Powerful on-prem analytics and recordings combined with secure cloud-based backups.
But video surveillance is heavily reliant on another component, something that we've been working on for a while. And that is Synology Cameras. Surveillance Station works with thousands of cameras today, not to mention support for open standards like ONVIF. But the convenience, experience of use, and most importantly security of many of the cameras on the market today leaves something to be desired. Synology's cameras are designed exclusively for Surveillance Station, and focus on better integration and security. Deployment with Synology Cameras is going to be the easiest of the whole industry.
No pre-setup needed. Simply connect them to your network and adopt them through the Surveillance Station wizard. And that's it. All settings can be managed directly from Surveillance Station, letting you perform quick adjustments to suit the environment the cameras are in. Our cameras feature powerful onboard processing, enabling edge AI capabilities like setting up intrusion detection zones, which is processed on the camera itself, which in turn frees up resources from the host, especially if you're running dozens or hundreds of cameras. Additionally, with dedicated processing, you'll get more detailed email alerts, which can now include a short embedded video clip.
And this also expands to recordings from our cameras, where you can search for people and vehicles at any time without the need to first predefine locations. Through Surveillance Station, you'll be able to quickly jump to places that might be of interest. This is considerably faster than normal video searches, all thanks to our cameras' edge AI capabilities.
We didn't stop there, though. Managing your Synology Cameras is also simple on your mobile device. In our upgraded DS cam app, you can set up, configure, and define detection modes, and even perform event searches from anywhere. So, no matter where you're at, or how you want to manage your deployment, you have all of the most used capabilities of Surveillance Station and Synology Cameras available. And finally, using the same security and privacy-first principles, we aim to make Synology Cameras one of the most secure cameras on the market, with full encryption support, long-term firmware updates, and being fully NDAA and TAA compliant. We'll be releasing our 500 Series cameras starting in the first half of 2023.
Coming in two form factors, the 500 Series cameras will feature a 5 MP sensor for wide angle 16:9, 3K recording resolution at 30 FPS, they're waterproofed with IP67 certification, and can be powered through PoE or 12 V adapters. Both models will support edge storage capabilities using a MicroSD card. During network or server outages, footage is still recorded and will be synchronized back to Surveillance Station later. Synology Cameras are an interesting new product lineup for us, one that allows us to leverage years of surveillance experience to design cameras with better integration, more innovative features, and with a lot more emphasis on security.
And we have ambitious plans to quickly expand our offering with higher resolution and more specialized cameras already in the works. By designing these cameras in house for our own Surveillance Station, we can provide one-stop shop support and even better integration in the future. Before we move on from video surveillance, we're going to introduce one more tiny new product: the VS750HD, a continuation of our highly compact video display solution designed for monitoring centers. The new VisualStation will start shipping in the first half of 2023.
Video surveillance is one of the most cost-effective ways to identify and respond to intrusions against a business or organization. Past physical security, we need large-scale monitoring and auditing of systems, and that is, of course, through our Active Insight platform. Since its initial Beta release with DSM 7, Active Insight has brought fleet-level monitoring to over 1.4 million devices. Active Insight was officially released in August and is now a premier one-stop device monitoring solution for large-scale customers and partners.
Customers got access to a bird's-eye view of all performance and storage metrics, login notifications, and even Hyper Backup tasks, all centralized in one convenient location. However, we're not going to just stop at performance metrics or even security and backup tasks. We're further expanding monitoring capabilities to help businesses get a better sense of how their data is being used. In 2023, Active Insight will gain data loss prevention features, one of the first major expansions we're making to the platform. Key to delivering this are data auditing and more intelligent and proactive ways to finding out if your systems are under active attack, such as from ransomware. To deliver these, we'll be introducing a new analytics pipeline to Active Insight.
From the very beginning, we'll gather and provide expanded monitoring of user activities. This includes common items like login activity, file access, and file sharing tasks created. Some configurations will be needed by administrators to determine, for example, the level of importance of certain shared folders. In the next stage of the pipeline, Active Insight will run the data through both predefined and configurable thresholds, and issue alerts if any of them are triggered.
For example, let's imagine a folder that HR uses to store employee performance evaluations, confidential complaints, and so on. These files would need to be archived but should never be replicated or shared. If Active Insight detects data matching the checksums linked to those folders being uploaded or shared, it'll immediately raise the alarm and notify relevant teams that a data policy breach has occurred.
The actions taken are definable by administrators to make sure they fit specific needs of your organization. In another example, ransomware, Active Insight will perform continuous monitoring of user and storage activity, establishing baselines. When an attack occurs, it'll likely trigger a multitude of predefined or custom rules, and then cause actions to be taken. In this case, we'll want Active Insight to command the affected systems to terminate those suspicious connections until an administrator or security team can investigate.
Data loss prevention is a huge field, and Synology is heavily invested in ensuring our customers get the best blend of convenience and security. Stay tuned for more information about Active Insight when we're closer to release. On that same theme, merging convenience with security, let's move on to one of the most important services needed in a modern organization: identity and device management. For this, I'm sending it to Tony. Thanks Cody. Businesses IT environments today are complex, featuring diverse hardware systems, cloud SaaS services, and not to mention the tape and glue that tie different solutions together.
One fundamental requirement that has never changed has always been user and device management. On DSM, Synology Directory Server is a full-fledged AD replacement solution, allowing many businesses to move away from costly licensing while retaining powerful capabilities like device group policies and having multiple domain controllers for high availability. On the other hand, we released C2 Identity as a hybrid-cloud identity service, designed to enable not only user and device management but to bridge the gap between on-prem and cloud many teams face today. It's a chore to maintain multiple sets of credentials, especially with 2FA attached to all of them. With C2 Identity, we can solve that by offering end users with a unified directory service, regardless of whether they're using on-prem systems or third-party SaaS.
For 2023, we're going beyond convenience, and joining one of the most important security initiatives: going passwordless. C2 Identity already works across your endpoints, internal systems, servers, and of course, with cloud applications and suites. But these are still done through fixed passwords, and many services, especially more legacy ones, don't support 2FA, largely throwing out most of the best practices we've seen get promoted. New to C2 Identity is a more secure yet still convenient authentication method.
For web services that already support single sign-on via SAML protocol, it's simple. Users can receive and approve login requests on their mobile devices, or enter one-time passwords generated by app or delivered by SMS, when the first option is not available. C2 Identity will also support adaptive 2FA, meaning there will be options to only require additional verification on untrusted devices.
Again, for that balance of security and convenience. For other services, such as internal web services or VPNs that authenticate through LDAP, employees can switch to using time-based one-time passwords instead of entering fixed passwords every time. Finally, device logins can also blend together biometrics that are available on the hardware, allowing Windows Hello, Apple Face ID and Touch ID to be used to log in to the devices. C2 Identity also supports integrated Windows authentication, which can drastically improve the user experience of many deployments, especially if using a second device like a mobile phone simply isn't feasible.
Let's take a look at a typical process at the start of the day for most people. First, they sign in to their device with their AD password, then they open a browser and navigate to their webmail or other services. And finally, they separately sign in to these services using a fixed or time-based password, with or without two-factor authentication.
With C2 Identity, we can help kick-start things a bit faster and with fewer passwords. Sign in to your device with Windows Hello, open your browser, go to your team productivity apps, and see how you're automatically signed in. For access to more sensitive applications such as your ERP or CRM software, we will support options to enable passwordless 2FA. C2 Identity will give admins more options, so that each team can find the right balance of security and convenience for each service and device. And we're making C2 Identity easier for organizations to adopt. In addition to the existing ability to integrate with Windows AD services, C2 Identity will integrate with Synology Directory Server, allowing it to be used as an extension with only minimal migration needed.
As mentioned earlier, at Synology we take a multi-layered approach to infrastructure security. Most businesses today already have a number of solutions, from antivirus on endpoints to network monitoring and firewalls. Synology solutions provide administrators with vertically integrated monitoring and management capabilities designed to just work.
And we're continuously adding features that help enhance security while keeping daily operations simple. In short, we will continue to expand our ecosystem of infrastructure solutions. Now, before we go, there's one more thing we'd like to announce.
Dealing with multi-layered security and management complexities that come with it is tough enough at work. At home, there are easier but still effective ways of securing your data, devices, and your network. Synology Routers are designed to tackle the challenges of modern smart homes and small offices with powerful network management capabilities — but only if you want them.
SRM 1.3 was one of the most significant updates we've released for the platform, bringing Synology Router users full VLAN and network segmentation support, a fully revamped mobile application, improved device detection, and notifications whenever new devices join your network. All of this cumulates into a powerful, secure, and well-integrated network foundation. Earlier this year, we launched our widely anticipated RT6600ax Wi-Fi 6 router, winning positive feedback from reviewers and users. The RT6600ax joined our existing lineup: the RT2600ac and MR2200ac, which are still capable entry to mid-range performers. Today, we're introducing the new mid-range Wi-Fi 6 router: the WRX560.
With a powerful dual-band radio, this new router is great for smaller homes or offices that use a single router, or can act as a mesh Wi-Fi node in places that already run other Synology Routers. Featuring a dual-use 2.5GbE port, the WRX560 also enables fast transfers to a compatible PC, NAS, or switch.
Most importantly, the WRX560 will launch next month at US$209. Looking back at our lineup, the RT2600ac and MR2200ac will remain available, and with SRM 1.3.1, all devices can be meshed with each other allowing for flexible mix and match upgrades. We still have much more planned for our SRM networking platform and product lineup in 2023, so definitely stay tuned for more exciting news.
Now, back to Derren. As you can see, 2023 is going to be a feature-packed year. Synology is innovating across all of our solutions, introducing many innovative and segment-leading technologies.
We are helping our customers become more resilient and adaptable to new and emerging challenges. We can't wait to release the new products and features we just announced. And we truly think many of them would change the way we typically view IT infrastructure, turning them from a complex maze into something that is more manageable and secure. Thank you for joining us. Have a great day.
2022-10-29