Designairspace is safer than CAD Workstations. Why?

Designairspace is safer than CAD Workstations. Why?

Sep 11, 2017 Posted by: designair space

8 Reasons why running CAD online with designairspace is more secure than through on-premise CAD Workstations.

CAD Data are the crown-jewels for discrete manufacturing companies. Digital product designs take many man-years to create. They contain a lot of intellectual property. They represent the future revenue of a company.

So, it is crucial to protect this information. Keeping your 3D Data off the local machines and in a secure datacenter helps you do that. That's why 3D Data are much more secure in our cloud than on your local Workstations and network. 

comparison of designairspace security vs cad workstations

1 - CAD Data is protected from loss of device

With designairspace, your CAD application and your CAD data reside in our cloud, not on your computer (or it's cache). In the datacenter, your CAD data are much better protected. 

Consider the analogy with Netflix, the service that streams movies from the cloud to end-user devices. Before Netflix, movies were distributed via (illegal) file sharing. With Netflix, the intellectual property of Hollywood studio’s is much better protected.

The same is true for your CAD Data. Move your digital design off moderately-protected physical CAD workstations and place them in a highly-secure cloud.

2 - CAD Data is protected when your password is compromised

Designairspace offers 2-factor authentication. This means that you need 2 pieces of ‘evidence’ to access to your designairspace machine.

An example of two-factor authentication is the ATM; only the possession of a bank card (first evidence) and a PIN (second evidence) allows you to take out money.

With designairspace, the first evidence is you username plus password. If you turn on 2-factor authentication (you should), you will receive an authentication QR code. With this QR code, you can turn on an authentication app such as Google Authentication.

This gives an extra layer of security beyond the username/password combination. 

3 - CAD Data is end-to-end encrypted

Designairspace uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to secure the internet connection between your machine and our cloud. TLS is a cryptographic protocol.

It prevents third parties to “wiretap” into the communication between your computer and the designairspace cloud.

Of course, once the traffic arrives in our Datacenter, the traffic remains encrypted. The various components that make up our services, such as databases, are secured with secured with 256-bit AES or higher 

4 - CAD Data resides in a highly secure facility 

In most offices, many individuals can “touch” 3D CAD workstations. Examples are co-workers, members of the cleaning crew and visitors. Or whoever else can get past the reception.
 
In contrast, designairspace has strict physical access policies.
  • The datacenter itself is a non-descript facility.
  • It can be easily be mistaken for a high-security prison: fences, closed-circuit monitoring, motion-detection equipment and security personnel are permanently guarding it.
  • Access is strictly controlled via badges.
  • The actual physical machines are in cages. These are in areas that only authorized personnel can access via elevated roles granted through the badge access system.
  • The network traffic in the datacenter is 100% isolated
  • Finally, independent auditors and third-party organizations) have certified that the data centers are ISO and SSAE16 compliant.

5 - CAD Data is protected from power outage, flooding and fire

Our facilities have uninterruptible power and backup systems. Fire detection and prevention systems minimize the risk of fire; in the unlikely case it happens, fire control systems kick in. The facilities are not on flood planes.

6 - CAD Data can be recovered after faults and errors

What happens if a workstation breaks down? If the user has involuntarily corrupted part files? If CAD files are accidentally saved in a wrong version? 

On a CAD workstation, this is loss of work. Designairspace protects end-users from this misery. They can restore their virtual machine to a previous state. This previous state is called a snapshot.

When an error happens, just restore the virtual machine to the latest snapshot. 

7 - Corporate firewall protects the CAD data

A firewall is a tried-and-true barrier to keep unwanted traffic away. It’s probably what’s protecting your current 3D CAD Workstations. With designairspace, you can configure a firewall around the virtual 3D CAD machines or run them behind your own firewall (or both).

8 - Fine-grained User, Access and Identity Management

Our tightly controlled environment has another big security advantage. It is very easy to know who is in our cloud, when, and where. In addition, there are tools to centrally manage identity from users and partners with strong authentication and granular permissioning. These include:

  • A robust role-based permissioning system. This helps maintain tighter control (both machines and drives) in comparison with CAD Workstations
  • Active Directory integration for access control
  • Advanced account management (sign out of all sessions remotely, alerting, etc)
  • Login monitoring and access logs providing (anonymized) intelligence and visibility over all the content, users, devices and activity in your virtual CAD machines.

In summary: your CAD data are much more secure with us than on your local machines and networks. You may have a safety deposit box for your crown jewels: we have a bank. 

Want to see how it works? Try our free trial today.