Algolia Vault – Bringing Physical & Digital Data Security to Search

At Algolia, we take search seriously. And we take security even more seriously. Search is the means by which users access personal & often private data, and one of the reasons customers trust that data on Algolia’s servers is because we have strong security for all of our customers – even our forever-free Community plan used by thousands of websites today.

Great search & secure search don’t have to be contradictory

Some data is more sensitive than others. Last year Algolia set out to provide an extra level of security for our customers for whom privacy concerns & secure data are core to their business (or a regulatory requirement of the industry they work in). We recently began making that feature available to our Enterprise users upon request, and we’re excited to introduce Algolia Vault.

Algolia Vault is a dual-faceted approach to making sure that the most sensitive data can’t be compromised. Medical records for a digital healthcare service or personal user data used only internally should be searchable and secure.

Algolia Vault brings extra physical security by activating encryption-at-rest, encrypting your data even when it’s not being used. By default, Algolia encrypts all data transfers, but adding encryption-at-rest means that your data is safe in the case of physical theft.

Likewise, Algolia Vault brings extra digital security by allowing customers to create an IP Whitelist, preventing any access from non-authorized IPs. IP whitelisting means a tradeoff against access by your dedicated Solutions Engineer & Customer Success Manager; however, Algolia Vault users can limit access to select IPs to make sure their data isn’t accessed by unwanted users.

Algolia Vault limits implementations to back-end, meaning that your search speed becomes dependent on the speed of your servers (and not just ours). Of course, you’re still benefiting from the Algolia engine’s lightning fast search speed and our support team is there to work with you to keep your end-users satisfied with the overall Search UX.

With Algolia Vault, we’re one step closer to making search available to all product builders, no matter the platform, language, or business needs they may have. Sensitive data shouldn’t be punished with bad Search UX just because the data needs to be secure – financial institutions, governments, healthcare & providers are among those the most affected in terms of end-user experience due to the requirement & expectation of data security. With Algolia Vault, along with our ongoing security certifications and requirements, we hope to bring great search UX to every product, app, website & service.   

If you’re interested in trying out Algolia Vault today or learning more about how we prioritize security, you can check out some of our other security-related blog posts, or reach out to us directly on Twitter or by email.