CoStar Delivers a Secure and Reliable Information Environment

2 min read
April 18, 2014
CoStar Real Estate Manager Blog

CoStar Delivers a Secure and Reliable Information Environment

You cannot operate effectively without immediate availability and access to your commercial real estate information. That’s why the CoStar Real Estate Manager infrastructure uses the latest, proven technologies to ensure the security, availability, and business continuity of your real estate information.

We’ve designed our system to protect your critical real estate information from unauthorized access by external sources, while ensuring the right people within your organization have access to only the information needed to make the best business decisions possible.

Security: Multiple Layers with Annual Audits for Maximum Protection

Physical security – Our servers are hosted at an ISO9000 2001 certified co-location facility, which is subject to an annual SSAE 18 audit report.  The facility provides comprehensive and multi-faceted physical security, power redundancy and backup, state-of-the-art fire suppression systems and modern heating/ventilation/air conditioning (HVAC).  Additionally, this facility provides highly controlled access requiring three-factor authentication and 24/7/365 close circuit digital video monitoring.

Network security – All publicly accessible servers are protected by redundant firewalls, with a second layer of redundant firewalls as added protection against unauthorized access to data.  The servers are protected using a network-wide intrusion detection system and are subjected to regular penetration testing.  As part of our process, CoStar Real Estate Manager:

  • Performs regular penetration testing and daily firewall log reviews to identify potential security threats.
  • Processes high security updates immediately, while applying all other updates during a monthly change control process.

Application security – To ensure you only have access to your company data, CoStar Real Estate Manager stores customer data on dedicated databases.  As a further security measure, we scan all application code for vulnerability.  CoStar Real Estate Manager also offers Single Sign On (SSO) authentication support, which gives you the ability to access your system simply by signing in on your corporate network.  We also support Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) encryption for web servers and browsers, enabling secure communications.

Availability: The Most Dependable at the Highest Performance Levels

Reliability – Our platform delivers enterprise-class performance with the highest service-level agreements of system availability in the industry.

Infrastructure Monitoring – All elements of the CoStar Real Estate Manager hosting infrastructure are monitored for uptime, performance and capacity.  Our framework tracks performance and issues alerts when thresholds are reached.

Redundancy – CoStar Real Estate Manager has designed its hosting infrastructure to provide maximum redundancy at all key service layers.  The design allows for failover of layers without a loss of performance, and allows segments of the infrastructure to be taken down for maintenance without end user impact.

Servers – All servers, which are optimized for virtualization, are rated as high dependability for a solid operating lifespan and carry on an energy star rating for power management.

Business Continuity: A Reliable Backup Plan

Because data is at the heart of your business, it’s critical to protect it. To protect against accidental loss of user data, CoStar Real Estate Manager performs incremental backups of all data every ten minutes and a full backup every night.  These backups are stored offsite, with multiple copies created and stored within the data center, and at the CoStar Real Estate Manager disaster recovery hosting mirror location.

Scalability and Growth

CoStar Real Estate Manager uses an N-tiered, fully scalable web architecture that separates physically into two different machines – web servers run pages and scripts, middle-tier servers run COM objects, database servers and file servers – allowing CoStar Real Estate Manager to easily scale to meet customer needs for their applications and grow their business.