I’m proud of the security decisions we made in developing our software, DocKit, and I want to tell you about them.
Let’s start with data storage. We deal with ridiculous amounts of data created over the course of years on hundreds of construction projects. When we started developing DocKit, I knew immediatey where I wanted to store the data: Amazon Web Services. Thankfully, our software developer had a great working relationship with a contact at Amazon Web Services. Before we knew it, we were talking to someone at Amazon; for a startup company, this was quite an amazing moment.
I am going to take a step back and explain how we use Amazon Web Services. All electronic data created on a computer gets stored somewhere. If you are at home working on your laptop, your data probably is being stored on your laptop. If you are at work, your data is probably being stored on your company’s servers.
When we developed our software, we could have chosen any number of storage locations for electronic data. We could have used local servers stored in our offices. Of course, this would have been an insane business decision; using Amazon Web Services servers is cheaper, and offers a more robust and secure solution We could have also tried to find cheap servers provided by some no-name company trying to imitate Amazon Web Services. This was also not an option.
I often tell people that as an attorney, I understand the risks inherent in storing another company’s data. And if we weren’t using Amazon Web Services, I’m not sure I could sleep at night. The federal government apparently agrees with me:
Amazon announced that its Amazon Web Services cloud can now be used for government business, having received a nod from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. . . . The three-year certification lets Amazon boast that its security and other systems are reliable enough to allow the company’s cloud to store sensitive but unclassified government data.
Amazon Web Services is the first company to be given this certification.
What’s the point? Our data is secure. That’s the point.
Photo credit: mkleit.13
