Introducing PhotoVaultOne - the privacy-first backup solution for your digital memories.
by Jani on April 29th, 2022It is with pleasure that I introduce the results of several months of work: PhotoVaultOne.
PhotoVaultOne was born with a simple but compelling mission to be your trusted partner in ensuring your digital memories are and remain safe and secure.
In today's digital world, it's sometimes easy to forget that the content you have stored online can be vulnerable to a variety of different threats. A simple mistake can mean the permanent loss of your content. PhotoVaultOne protects against these threats by automatically maintaining a copy of your content outside of your photo library. Any data loss can then be recovered from by restoring the content from PhotoVaultOne.
Privacy-first at every corner
To fulfill our mission, we need to store and process some of your most personal data. To us, it was clear from early on that privacy and data protection are non-negotiable, and must be built-in to all aspects of our solution. As a European vendor, we started by aligning with the strict data privacy requirements of the EU and its member countries.
To earn your trust, we set out to build on a foundation of transparency. We will share deep technical details of our solution and our processes so that you can be comfortable with storing your content in our service. Future posts will dive deeper into specific subjects, and discuss the specific implementations of data protection, all the way down to specific code examples.
At launch, our service can be used with Google Photos. Additional photo library services will be considered for implementation based on customer feedback.
Security in the cloud is different
We are a cloud-native company, with no physical infrastructure assets of our own. We chose to build and run on the world's largest cloud infrastructure services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). This means that your data is stored in some of the world's most secure facilities, trusted by many of the most demanding organizations globally.
Cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS invest significantly more into the security OF the cloud than most organizations ever could on their own. They own and manage the underlying hardware, software, networking, and facilities of the cloud. They also provide the foundational security capabilities for their customers to consume and secure their workloads. It is through these capabilities that PhotoVaultOne is also building its security foundation on.
PhotoVaultOne is responsible for the security of our solution IN the cloud. Read on to learn more about how we do this.
Data protection cornerstones
Throughout all of our product development and processes, the following cornerstones make the foundation for our data protection:
- Your data is processed only in the location of your choice. We make our solution available to you from several of AWS world-wide regions. At launch, you can choose(*) from 2 European locations: Stockholm, and Dublin(* available locations vary based on your country of residence).
- We collect and store only the minimum amount of information about you. (*) We don't collect information we don't need, such as your address or phone number. (* our payment provider Stripe may collect additional information for their use).
- All of your content is stored and processed with encryption, including data about you in our databases. Our design principle is that even if data from our service would somehow be accessed by an outsider, the data must remain unreadable and therefore of no value.
Further upcoming details
The intent of this post was to give you a brief overview of PhotoVaultOne and its data protection principles. We will dive deeper into select topics in future posts. Such topics could include for example:
- How we protect data about you using field-level encryption of database records in AWS DynamoDB
- Utilization of attribute-based access control in our AWS Lambda API functions
- A dive into VaultMode internals, and how it ensures that even we at PhotoVaultOne have no means of accessing your data.
- Isolation of processing of each of our customers background processes
We look forward to sharing these stories and many more to come with you.
Ready to give us a try? Feel free to leverage the no-strings-attached 3 month free trial.
About the author
Jani is the Founder and Chief Architect of PhotoVaultOne. Jani is also a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, where he strives to be a trusted advisor for Enterprises in the Nordics.
Disclaimer: All opinions and claims expressed are personal, and not that of Amazon Web Services.