Today I’d like to mention a subject that has appeared in Nozbe forums lately as well as on several blogs reviewing Nozbe – security of a web application.
Yes, Nozbe is a web application – meaning – the application as such is accessible only if you have a connection to the Internet… and as it’s hosted on our servers together with all the user data.
There are several advantages of this solution (access from different computers, no installs, low computer resource usage, easy-to-use interface, cross-system compatibility etc.) and there are some disadvantages… and among them the most important are security issues.
Life as such is never secure enough.
Life is dangerous and you die in the end… and the same applies to everything we do and use. No company, computer program, operating system, Internet service provider, etc… can guarantee you that 100% everything will work all the time… there’s always the famous Murphy’s law: something can always go wrong. The same applies to web applications.
Having said that, every application provider, or like us, web application provider, is doing (or at least should be doing) everything to secure their web application to the maximum possible extent. It doesn’t matter if you’re Google, Yahoo or… apivision.com. The same rules apply.
What we do to secure Nozbe and keep your data safe.
So let me give you several examples of the things we are doing to make sure Nozbe is running all the time, 24/7, day or night… and that your data is safe with us.
1. Good server provider
Although we are based in Europe, we chose a very well known server provider in the USA with "managed" service (meaning – local administrators keep our servers going at all times). This lets me sleep at night and be sure my users can always access their Nozbe Account at full speed.
2. Triple – backup!
First of all – the server has not just one hard disk, but an array of hard disks – so when one hard disk fails, there are other disks maintaining the server and keep our service running. Second – our server provider offers regular daily backups of our server. Third – we go even one step more with Nozbe – we backup our entire database to a remote server in the other part of the USA (other major server provider) – different server, different data-center – it can’t be more secure than that.
3. SSL Security
We will be applying 128-bit SSL encrypted login for all the Nozbe accounts and full SSL Nozbe account administration for Nozbe PRO users. All the communication between Nozbe and your computer will stay encrypted. Nobody will know how you’re getting things done :-)
4. Quick server upgrades as needed.
There is another good reason we chose a good server provider – we have a nice upgrade path in front of us so with more and more people using Nozbe every day, we can add memory chips, hard disks… very quickly and our admins will secure a seamless upgrade with practically 100% uptime.
5. Our company
We are apivision.com. We are a small privately-held company based in Europe and we love it that way. I started apivision.com six years ago in 2001 and I’m still loving it. Our strategic clients and web applications like HitRSS and Nozbe keep us moving and developing. We’ve been here for the last six years (gained lots of experience) and we are here to stay :-)
Big businesses, big money, big investors… will give you no guarantees… (still remember the dot-com boom back in 2000?)
This is Web 2.0 - a bunch of people who are passionate about what they are doing and love bringing the best service possible to their users is the best guarantee you can ever get.
One last thing…
All of this won’t convince you unless you’re comfortable with "moving your data to the cloud", i.e. using online web application and trusting an online system. I know many people still are not comfortable enough… but if you’re already using My Yahoo, Gmail, eBay etc… you won’t have a problem with Nozbe :-)
Feel free to sign up for Nozbe and take it for a spin
... or discuss this post on our Nozbe Forum.
Update (07 March): I guess I haven’t addressed this issue clearly in this post – web applications are about flexibility and the data you input to Nozbe (or any web app for that matter) is yours and truly yours… so yes – Nozbe will feature RSS, data export, printing and emailing support and all the other ways of giving you the possibility of backing up your data….
... and on the other hand we’ll give you more ways of inputting your data to Nozbe, like email, SMS, third-party programs using our API, etc…
Our goal is to give you all the flexibility you need to interact with your data while keeping your data as secure as possible and maintaining easy access to it at all times.
Our servers are located in specially protected facilities with fingerprint protectors and only screened admins who have physical access to the servers.
Jim, you can backup your data now
I belive this is a great too. How are we assured that our information will not be shared and how is it protected from identity theft?
How can I export my data to a comma delimited file?
Hi. Has this question been answered? That is, is our data encrypted on the server itself, as distinct from ‘on the wire’ (I think that is the jargon)? Cheers, Errol.
Is our data encrypted on the servers?
Or are senior administrators able to access our data?