Singapore AI Adoption Tied to Data Foundations

At its Annual Press Event 2026 in Singapore, Synology argued that the country's AI ambitions will only translate into measurable business results if enterprises first fix the data foundations underneath them.

The company pointed to survey evidence that more than 90% of Singapore respondents consider AI-ready infrastructure important to workflow efficiency and productivity, while flagging persistent gaps around security, recovery confidence and visibility into third-party AI tools that could blunt adoption.

The findings frame a market in which executives are broadly convinced of AI's value but uneasy about the underlying plumbing.

Data security and privacy emerged as the most pressing concern, cited by 71.3% of Singapore respondents, followed by data quality and availability at 46.3% and high implementation costs at 41.7%.

Infrastructure preferences reinforce that anxiety: approximately 58.7% of respondents prioritize hybrid infrastructure or on-premises deployments, compared with just 9.7% who prioritize public cloud, a signal that enterprises want tighter control over business-critical data as AI workloads expand.

Strategic Intent and Executive Validation

Synology positioned its 2026 portfolio around three priorities: scalable data infrastructure, stronger cyber resilience, and productive AI adoption with greater control over business data. Leadership framed the agenda in terms of operational durability rather than model performance.

AI creates value when it helps people do their work better and enables the business to respond more effectively to its customers. Our focus is to help organizations sustain those gains as adoption grows, with data they can trust and a dependable path to recovery when disruption occurs.

—Antoine Yang, Southeast Asia Head of Synology

The company also stressed that recovery assurance, not just backup, is now a board-level question. While 76% of Singapore respondents expressed confidence in their ability to recover quickly from ransomware while keeping backup data protected, only 26.9% described themselves as very confident, a gap that Synology argues must be closed before AI can be safely extended into core operations.

Architectural Deep Dive and Benchmarks

Synology's 2026 launches span storage, backup, collaboration and physical security.

The Singapore event forms part of a broader Southeast Asia push in which Synology is engaging enterprises that want AI capabilities without surrendering control of their data. Nearly 30% of Singapore respondents reported having no visibility into how data submitted to third-party AI tools is handled, a figure that Synology's on-premises portfolio is designed to address by keeping sensitive workloads inside the customer's own environment.

The company also pointed to its hybrid-cloud ecosystem, which spans enterprise storage, backup, file sharing, collaboration, video surveillance and networking, as the connective layer for organizations standardizing AI deployments across multiple sites.

When businesses can trust how their data is managed and protected, they are better positioned to turn AI initiatives into lasting business results.

—Emily Oh, Singapore Country Manager of Synology

For CIOs and technical architects, the practical takeaway is that Singapore's AI agenda is increasingly being shaped by infrastructure decisions made outside the model layer.

Storage performance, backup immutability, hypervisor coverage and on-premises AI collaboration tools are now procurement criteria in their own right, and vendors are being judged on whether they can deliver them as an integrated stack rather than as point products.