Hello, I was wondering where the data is all stored with Speckle? I have clients that will not allow any data out on any kind of “cloud”.
Sadly @Dave your clients may be frustrated by the current landscape in AEC. From document control, collaboration tools, file storage, and obviously email, most of the authoring tools are engineered to use cloud (a proxy term for someone else’s computer)
In case of Speckle you have an element of control, however, should you wish to deploy your own Speckle server on your own network you can leverage some of Speckle for your own team and it never leave the office. Unfortunately there would be no means of sharing views or comments or data outside of your office.
So, yes, Speckle as a data hub is web hosted by us, but if you just want object conversion between 30 softwares for yourself Speckle uniquely can do that too.
The general availability server Speckle operates has a single secure data centre and by default publishing to Speckle uses that. We can also operate in a way that your data is in a specific geographical region.
Additionally all projects are completely secured to only the accounts that have permissions to collaborate on or view them. The last line of data security unique to Speckle versus any CDE is that we store all data published as individual objects, and not files.
We are confident that the infrastructure we have is robust and our processes too. Later this year we will achieve the international certifications that rubber stamp that.
We don’t believe it’s possible but we’re the most malicious entities to be interested in your clients data they would see a door handle, 2D line or parapet coping entirely without context. Steal a file from a CDE file store and there’s a full context of what those elements comprise.
Short of sending hard drives through the mail, your clients may be out of luck.
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Hello Jonathon!
Very informative response of which I thank you for.
I do have some questions still though with respect to the security/credentials you are currently carrying or pursuing, not only State-side, but internationally.
When you say “single secure datacenter”, what does secure really mean?
What is the current capacity versus foreseeable demand? Is it scalable to accommodate those forthcoming demands?
“International certifications” - What are those you are pursuing?
Lastly, speaking to the data held in the Speckle infrastructure: /you mention the objects i.e. door handle etc…What about all the metadata that is using in the charts and graphs that is built with Speckle and associated applications i.e. Excel, Word, PowerBI that is closely working alongside Speckle? Isn’t that held also on the Servers?
To give a bit of context on these questions, we do a tremendous amount of work for Government/Federal clients not only on US soil, but many locations across the world
Kindest regards,
Dave Vaughn
Our data centre provider for app.speckle.systems is fully certificated as secure. That’s just our default choice, though, We engineered things to be as vendor-neutral as possible, so deployment on Google, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web is equally possible.
If deployed on your infrastructure, Speckle is as secure as that is.
We have appointed auditors for similar accreditations for SOC2 and ISO27001
Correct; all properties and geometries for any individual object are stored individually in Speckle.
We have control over the complete chain of Publishers and Consumers with the Connectors and, as such, the disassembly and reassembly of project data. Once it leaves a Connector it is securely sent to speckle servers encrypted and only reassembled on receipt or viewed on the online viewer.
While our free accessible server is a single location, we can deploy servers in other regions as projects require. Uniquely for AEC data storage providers, this can be done in relatively discrete locations and territories worldwide. And also, where necessary, air-gapped from the public internet. This is part of our commercial offering.
We also have state entities as Speckle customers so we well understand your and their concerns on this matter.
Next week, we will announce our intermediate offering, where individual projects can be hosted anywhere and organised in workspaces, so watch this space.
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OMG, of all things I failed to ask, so sorry for this follow up question!
Where is/are your server(s) currently located?
We reserve the right to move the default location of the general availability Speckle server, but currently data defaults to UK hosting.