Domorela's Blog: Privacy

Given the nature of the product, that the targeted customers are mainly SMBs and thinking that the better smart building is the one with less external connections, from the very begining privacy was one of the key points in the design of Domorela.

Today the most of the professional IT products are offered "as a service" at the cost of less security and losing the customers/users privacy. The reasons for the "as a service" model are various, being today the exploitation of users data as the most relevant but the training of Expert Systems, an Artificial Intelligence technique, is emerging with force.

The software industry started SaaS (Software as a Service) in order to avoid piracy installing the core of applications in the Cloud  with the user interface being loaded by a thin client software in the customer's device. Later the business moved to the data and SaaS evolved in a way that today there are a lot of "not so smart devices" capable only to execute lighter routines that need to be connected to the cloud to offer his capabilities calling remote SaaS complex routines.

Of course certain enterprise SaaS products can be acquired as "on premise" but the cost of this kind of solution can be only assumed by a few of customers and the most of the SMBs are obliged to go to the SaaS model, being his business less secure in all aspects (lets suppose what if your SaaS provider suddeny disappears with all your data, are you covering that risk?) and losing privacy of his business, customers and employees.

So the Cloud and the Internet of Things is being like the story of the One Ring of The Lord of the Rings, SMBs are being honored with "cheap" SaaS and affordable "not so smart devices" that actually are under the control of the provider, instead of the customer, more than ever. And many of us are wondering when the Cloud will be so black to be compared as Mordor.

By now SaaS and cloud providers are taking profit about users data and training Artificial Intelligence whith users behaviour but, in a near future, if it is not already today, cloud providers will have the upper hands and they simply will "rule them all", being the final customers and SMB providers catched by an oligopoly of a few huge holdings.

And curiously, all the above is happening precisely when electronic devices are more smart and powerful than ever to bring capabilities by themselves and the users now have the possibility to retain the most part of the control instead to give it all to the Cloud.

Opposite to the above, Domorela can provide maximum privacy and better security to the SMB because offers all his capabilities by itself and doesn't require to be connected to any cloud to bring them to the customers. User profiles are created and stored in the device, not the cloud, and doesn't include personal data.

Domorela's REST API allows to connect it to an unexpensive Private Cloud in which Domorela can be only queried by remote devices from a private IP network, commonly referred as Intranet, via secure protocol. This leads us to say that Domorela helps to implement an "Intranet of Things" belonging to the user, thus avoiding to be part of an Internet of Things network belonging to a third party.

The above doesn't mean that Domorela can't be part of an Internet of Things cloud. If the final user wants, he is completely free to include a Domorela unit to any cloud as an Edge Gateway. In the case a Domorela unit is working as an Edge Gateway of a cloud, it will be done through the REST API that allows Domorela to receive queries and commands only from authorised remote hosts via secure protocol.

As this is a very important topic to us, in later articles we'll talk about privacy again.