Drive inside the office is easy. The moment staff work from home, you must choose how the NAS is reached from the internet — and each of the three doors trades speed, safety and effort differently. Here is the honest comparison, so you choose on facts instead of habit.
Synology gives you three established ways in: QuickConnect, DDNS with port forwarding, and a VPN. Forums argue about them endlessly, usually by declaring one 'unsafe' and another 'slow' without the conditions attached. The truth is more useful: each is the right answer for somebody. What is never optional — whatever door you pick — is the account discipline underneath, and this page will say so more than once.
QuickConnect is Synology's own connection service: you register a QuickConnect ID on the NAS, staff enter that ID in Drive Client, and Synology brokers the connection — no router settings, no static IP, works behind almost any connection. Its honest cost is speed: when a direct connection cannot be established, traffic relays through Synology's servers, and large syncs through a relay are noticeably slower. For a small team syncing documents, that trade is usually worth it. For a design team pushing gigabytes daily, it will not be.
With Synology's built-in DDNS service, your NAS gets a stable name (something like youroffice.synology.me) even on a changing home or office connection, and you forward the needed ports on the router — Drive's sync service uses port 6690 — straight to the NAS. Result: the fastest possible connection, fully under your control. The honest price: those ports are now visible to the entire internet, which scans them constantly. That is manageable — with DSM kept updated, strong unique passwords and 2-step verification — but it is a responsibility you accept knowingly, not a default to drift into.
With the VPN Server package on the NAS (or a VPN on your router), remote staff first connect a VPN, then use Drive exactly as if they were in the office — the NAS itself is never published to the internet at all. This is the most control and the least exposure, and the honest costs are setup effort and one more step for staff every day: connect VPN, then work. For offices handling genuinely sensitive data — client accounts, legal, medical — that extra step is not friction, it is the job.
Match the door to the office, not to ideology:
You can also graduate: many offices start on QuickConnect and move to DDNS or VPN when the team or the data outgrows it. Changing doors later is a settings change, not a rebuild.
Every publicised NAS compromise story has the same boring root causes — none of them are the connection method:
Choose any door and keep these five rules, and your setup is safer than most. Break them, and no connection method will save you.
Watch the complete Synology Drive setup video first — remote access only works well when the folders, users and clients underneath are set up properly.
▶️ Watch Full VideoQuickConnect itself is Synology's managed connection service and is a reasonable choice for small teams. The realistic risks around it are the same as every route — weak or shared passwords and missing 2-step verification. Enable 2-step verification on all accounts and QuickConnect is a sound default.
No — outside the office, speed is capped by your office connection's upload speed and, on QuickConnect relay connections, by the relay. Documents feel fine on any of the three routes; large media work is where the difference shows, and where DDNS or VPN earns its keep.
Yes. Nothing stops you keeping QuickConnect for convenience while the office's regular remote workers use DDNS or VPN. Many offices do exactly this — just apply the same account rules to every route, because security is only as strong as the weakest open door.