Data In SAAS Providers: How Safe Are They?
When selecting a SaaS provider, it is crucial to prioritize your data's safety and understand the integrity of your contract. Given the large volume of collected, stored, and processed data, it is essential to ensure that your data is always protected. and when committing to a long-term SaaS contract, you must understand the terms and ensure they do not change unexpectedly.
This article will use SelfCAD, a professional CAD software provider, as an example of what to look out for to ensure the privacy of your data and what you need to know about SaaS contracts. However, most topics discussed are general and relevant to any SaaS provider.
How Secure Is My Data With SelfCAD?
SelfCAD is a subscription-based SAAS provider. Like other professional SAAS providers, our corporate and professional users often ask the obvious question: How safe is my data? Some answers may be unique to SelfCAD as a professional CAD software provider, but most are general and relevant to any SaaS provider. Therefore, I will address the general concerns and then relate them to CAD software and SelfCAD.
Why Choose a SaaS Subscription?
Let's start with the "why": Why do people choose a SaaS subscription over a traditional one-time purchase for 3D modeling software? Well, the 3D modeling industry involves working with relatively large objects. It often requires collaboration with teams and other designers, presenting a significant data and networking challenge for many small and midsize businesses (SMBs). This is why many companies prefer a SaaS subscription that can manage and scale data efficiently using built-in data integration tools, allowing them to share and collaborate with our entire design team. Data room software optimizes secure data management and team collaboration within SaaS platforms.
The Financial Benefits of SAAS for Businesses and Consumers
In addition to the data and networking benefits, SelfCAD, like many other SaaS providers, does not charge hefty upfront fees like most traditional CAD software. Moreover, they automatically upgrade the software without any additional charges, which offers significant financial benefits compared to any other CAD software on the market.
1. Understanding Your SaaS Contract
SaaS, by definition, involves a long-term contract. Like any other contract, it is important to understand the terms and whether/how they are subject to change. The good thing is that SelfCAD is committed to never changing its contract. SelfCAD has been offering software since its beginning stages of development, charging next to nothing, and has never altered these contracts. As we continue to improve and add more advanced features, there is a potential for us to raise the base price. However, we assure you that we will never increase the price of an active contract.
2. Storage Limitations
SelfCAD currently does not impose any storage limitations, and we will keep it that way. However, we may start charging extra for excessive storage usage. To maintain SelfCAD as the most competitively priced 3D Modleing application, it may become necessary to limit free storage usage at some point. However, there are no plans to do so in the near foreseeable future.
3. Understanding the Perpetual Licenses Option
The perpetual licensing option has been a favorite for many businesses, as it offers lifetime access while still providing all the benefits of SaaS software, but SelfCAD plans to change that. SelfCAD's support team and cloud resources require continuous costs, making it unreasonable to offer a one-time price while still providing support and free data storage for a lifetime at no additional cost. Therefore, we will either phase out the perpetual license option or start charging for upgrades like most other software providers. However, we assure you that we will not change the existing contracts. So, if you purchase a perpetual license before we announce changes, we will honor all existing contract agreements.
How Safe Is Your Data with a SAAS Provider?
We outlined the key benefits of a typical SaaS. However, no solution is perfect. (This is why SelfCAD also offers an offline version, as we will discuss later on) Entrusting your data to a third party raises the question of its security. To answer that, we first need to understand the security concerns in cloud computing, which is an integral part of any SaaS solution.
Cloud computing is the foundation for SaaS providers like SelfCAD, enabling us to scale our services. However, this also means that, besides the SaaS company, there are potential data risks associated with the cloud provider. As a result, there are five security concerns to consider.
The five data security concerns that every SaaS company needs to address are:
- How secure is your cloud?
- How safe is your data in transit?
- What can they see?
- Who has access to your data?
- How can I protect my data so that no one can see it?
Below is the answer to each of these questions.
- How secure is your cloud? SelfCAD uses Google Cloud, a PCI-compliant provider, for all its data storage and management needs. As a result, there are very few concerns regarding the security of the storage itself.
- How safe is your data in transit? SelfCAD adheres to PCI-compliant requirements for data transfers and has a team of white-hat hackers who continuously challenge our security. The SelfCAD team quickly addresses any potential vulnerabilities they find.
- What can they see? SelfCAD deals with three types of data: a) General login and usage statistics: b) Your 3D designs c) Your payment info.
a) Login and usage statistics are mostly collected anonymously. However, there is an option to view how often you log in. If you use the online version, they may potentially also see which tools you frequently use.
b) Your 3D designs can potentially be visible to the support team, but only if you rely on the cloud version, as I will explain shortly thereafter.
c) SelfCAD does not handle any of your payment information. Instead, we rely on Stripe and PayPal. Using their hosted pages, all payment data is handled directly by these outside providers and never reaches our cloud servers. We only see the minimum information that they show us in their dashboards. - Who has access to your data? SelfCAD's cloud servers and admin pages are very well protected, with limited access granted only to a handful of developers and support team members. The marketing and sales teams may obtain anonymous usage data statistics, but private data is highly guarded and restricted to only the essential support team.
SelfCAD takes pride in having the best professional support team. They often require access to user files to provide assistance with 3D modeling inquiries. However, they rarely need to access anyone's project as most users prefer to share the objects they need assistance with. - How can I protect my data so that no one can see it? SelfCAD offers three versions: a) Its popular online, browser-based software, b) Its desktop version with cloud storage, and c) Its fully autonomous desktop version with local storage. Opting for the desktop version with local storage ensures full protection of your 3D and usage data.
Login information may still be collected in all versions, but no usage or 3D design data is ever transmitted to the cloud when using the SelfCAD offline version.
The offline desktop version of SelfCAD does not offer the scalable cloud storage that other versions provide. Nevertheless, users can still share their work through SelfCAD's object-sharing methods. Using the local storage option can also be beneficial when working on large projects, as streaming from the cloud tends to be slower than opening files from your local computer for larger objects.
In summary, SelfCAD offers online and desktop cloud options, providing all the benefits of typical SaaS software while ensuring the best protection for the limited data they collect. However, they also offer an offline desktop version that does not collect sensitive data for users who require extra data protection and those who work on relatively large files.
Who Uses SelfCAD and Why Do They Choose Us?
We often receive questions about whether SelfCAD is designed for enterprise usage and, if so, who the typical users are. The honest answer is that SelfCAD was initially designed for freelance designers and hobbyists, as they benefit the most from its flexible features and ease of use.
However, we soon realized that SelfCAD's advanced selection and mesh editing tools are greatly needed in many professional industries, particularly in the medical field or other industries that need to edit 3D scanned objects. Industry-specific software is usually better for template-based modeling, as it allows customized design templates tailored to specific use cases within that industry. For example, Cedreo is a specialized home design software that continually adds commonly used designs to its library. This is the fastest way to create a general house design idea by mixing and editing ready-made house components. However, they lack the creativity that SelfCAD's vast design tools offer.
Similarly, premetric modeling software has an added advantage when working on complex mechanical designs. Creating each part requires a lot of effort, and it is much more difficult to define all parameters. However, this is of great benefit when working on complex designs that often require fine-tuning and dynamically editing parameters. However, the downside of parametric modeling software is that it limits you to designs created from scratch and makes it almost impossible to edit imported mesh objects.
SelfCAD, On the other hand, has a typical, familiar undo/redo flow for fixing design errors. However, deeper edits require additional effort, so the tradeoff is between fast creation and slower editing (SelfCAD) or slow creation and relatively fast editing (premetric modeling software). The design type also plays a crucial role, as parametric modeling is generally limited to working with primitives and may not be suitable for organic designs. Conversely, SelfCAD is the ideal software for fast and precise organic modeling, particularly for low-poly modeling.
How to Edit Imported Mesh Objects?
As mentioned above, industry-specific modeling software is often limited to template editing, while parametric modeling is mostly limited to novel designs. But what if you need to edit a mesh generated from a 3D scanner? Or, what if you need to mix from the millions of ready-made designs available on 3D object sharing websites? This is where SelfCAD's unique selection and editing tools are essential.
Which Industries Use SelfCAD and Why?
SelfCAD is helping many in the medical field, from prosthetics to dentistry and even stent placement designs. They use SelfCAD to edit the imported scanned mesh data and to design extensions with SelfCAD’s vast creative tools that help them design bridges, loft surfaces, and more.
How Does SelfCAD Help in Education?
SelfCAD's interactive tutorials are a marvel for education. They enable students to practice real-world design ideas and are a blessing for educators teaching 3D modeling. Coupled with their educational videos, anyone can become a professional designer relatively quickly.
Conclusion
SelfCAD is used by hundreds of GDPR-compliant schools worldwide and is heavily utilized by many professional industries. We take data security very seriously and employ the best practices to accomplish that and maintain your trust and as always, we are ready to answer your questions at support@selfcad.com
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