Privacy by Design

In an age where user data privacy is vital, and large scale data breaches become international news, it’s understandable that some clients may nervously wonder if their development partners, who may be globally distributed, are observing the best security principles and protocols. At NerdCloud, we operate with Privacy by Design principles for minimizing the risks of data breaches. 

To make things as concrete as possible, we will use Hubspot in this article as an example environment.

Privacy by Design in a Hubspot environment

To develop a CMS database from HubSpot, all we require is your database structure or architecture. This is sometimes also known as a database schema, and it describes the structure of the data (how data is stored and tagged, and the branch structure by which it is searchable, among other factors).

We can obtain this from a CSV export from your HubSpot database, and we don’t use any of the actual data, merely the schema which organizes it. Having the structure allows us to populate it with fake test data, which we obtain from a number of AI-powered data mock-up sources, such as https://www.mockaroo.com/ or https://www.tonic.ai/. 

Privacy by Design also reduces worries about cyber-attacks. Since we’re working on your data schema only, there’s nothing of value to steal on our side of the expanded development ecosystem. For cyber criminals to target us would be like bank robbers breaking into the vault to find it empty, then attempting to steal the vault itself.

What is the Privacy by Design Workflow?

Here are the steps in our development process which ensure data security and privacy:

1. We extract the database schema and recreate the structure in our development environment. For Hubspot this is as simple as a CSV export.
2. Once we have a workable database, we populate it with fake data.
3. Development work occurs using this fake data, and all changes to code are recorded, so that roll backs can occur if required.
4. Once testing is complete, we publish to a production site and beta testing occurs.
5. If anything breaks, we have the changes log to use for roll backs and further development work.

What Happens if a Bug is Detected?

A common question asked of developers is what we do when a bug is detected on the production site. Here is the process we follow when that occurs:

1. A bug is detected and isolated.
2. The core developer team investigates
3. A fix task is created and assigned to NerdCloud
4. NerdCloud will either use development side data or re-populate with fake data.
5. NerdCloud fixes the bug and performs tests to confirm.
6. We issue a Merge Request (MR) or Pull Request (PR) to the core developer team
7. The core team approves each MR or PR
8. The code is then re-deployed to the production site.

In this way, we collaborate securely and efficiently, without ever having custody of any of your customer data. After all, you aren’t engaging NerdCloud to assess the quality of your Hubspot CMS data, but rather the design, build and efficiency of your database architecture.

We are always happy to discuss our data security protocols and methods with our collaborators, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with any queries you may have. We’re always open to suggestions and improvements. 

Meanwhile, why not check out some of our other articles. Alternatively, read our FAQs for more information on how NerdCloud helps clients augment their in-house developer teams for mission-critical online projects.

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