San Francisco, US-based 360-degree reality capture technology developer HoloBuilder has released a European version of its construction reality capturing solution.
I talked to Holobuilder in July 2017 and they exhibited at Digital Construction Week in London in October. Like several other US cloud vendors, HoloBuilder recognised that US-based hosting is unattractive to European customers. Its new EU Server Option enables construction clients to store HoloBuilder data on trusted Cloud servers located in Frankfurt, Germany. The Microsoft Azure Cloud Server Infrastructure is compliant with the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5).
German construction business Max Bögl Group is using the Holobuilder toolset, and technical BIM manager, Denise Gürteler, sees the advantages of HoloBuilder being available for data sensitive projects in Europe as follows:
“For example, HoloBuilder is currently being used on a confidential project in Europe, in which over 2,000 rooms have to be documented. When we have to capture only one 360° image instead of dozens of regular photos for every room in a project of this size, this saves us a lot of time. Besides, the structured approach to data storage, accompanied by the Offline HoloViewer for archiving and the TimeTravel feature are a tremendous help in later project stages.”
With all project data being hosted on C5, ISO27001 and ISO27018 certified infrastructure in the European Union, the HoloBuilder EU Server Option goes beyond the EU-US privacy shield. Customer data on German Azure servers can only be accessed by third parties if required by German law. Harald März, data protection officer at Max Bögl Group says:
“When it comes to certificates, we are always looking for the internationally accredited ISO 27001 with the ‘Statement of Applicability’ documents or ISO/IEC 27018, which we always have to require when we are looking cloud solution at Max Bögl. With the HoloBuilder E.U. Server Option, we have been assured that all project data is stored on a trusted European Microsoft Azure Cloud Environment and no data is being transmitted to insecure third-party countries. Together with a jurisdictional assurance, this was sufficient for us to use HoloBuilder with their E.U. Server Option for project documentation in our highly data sensitive projects in Europe.”
The full HoloBuilder Construction Solution can also be deployed on servers that are owned by individual companies. The company has also established a software development and support facility in Aachen, Germany , so that data access and processing for support, maintenance and, development tasks also only happens within the European Union. Holobuilder sees this as an important step to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force in Europe in May.
