How is my data stored, is it secure?

All uploads that are privately stored can only be accessed by the uploader when they are logged in.

Figshare is hosted on Amazon Web Services to ensure the highest level of security and stability for your research data, full security. Amazon S3 stores multiple, redundant copies of your information so you don’t have to worry about ever losing your master copy. AWS utilises an end-to-end approach to secure and harden its infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. Amazon S3 provides authentication mechanisms to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorised access.

Please note that this only applies to figshare.com and those institutions who have chosen figshare to host their data. If you are unsure, please contact your institutional administrator.

Every part of the figshare data store is backed up – we don’t just rely on the redundancy of Amazon’s cloud. We do daily backups of the metadata, and weekly snapshots of the entire data system, including an encrypted one of the S3 file store.

The figshare server clusters are monitored in real time and the service is able to scale readily to meet traffic spikes that may occur when you release new or exciting datasets. We also use MD5 checksums when ingesting and storing a file to ensure the file is intact in each of its storage locations.

The security and persistence of your files on figshare make it easy to prevent plagiarism of your research data, as all uploads are time-stamped.