Using airtable as a consultant for a client - data security question

Firstly, Airtable has data centers in US so data will be stored in US unless you are on enterprise plan for which Airtable offers Europe’s data residency too: https://blog.airtable.com/data-residency-for-airtable-customers/

Secondly, the confidentiality of the data is an agreement between you and the client. No matter which system you use, you will always hold certain sensitive data of the clients and usage of that will be governed by the terms of agreement between the two of you. At the Airtable level, you can implement certain level of access control to control who gets access to what. Couple of options you have are as following:

1. Separate bases for unrelated data: Keep unrelated data in separate bases and give base access to people in your team and client’s team on need to know basis.
2. Give base access to team through interfaces: Do not give base edit or read access to every team member. Base is like your backend database which only the admin should have access to. The users of the Base should access relevant and filtered data only through the interfaces. Through interfaces, you can control the fields that they get to see or edit.

Feel free to specify your specific needs and I can give a more precise answer.

ok, many thanks for your reply. 

No one from outside our team would ever see the data, it’s basically just for internal management mostly and we would implement 2FA login for the team. It’s a small team of 5. 

We may add some people from the client to the tool on occasion, just for the reporting purposes. 

I guess the only doubt i have is that the data would be stored in the USA because we are based in Europe. Althought the client is multinational. 
Like you say, i guess it comes down to the agreement we have with the client. 

Another thing worth thinking about is whose Airtable account the base lives in, yours or the client’s?

If it’s in your workspace, you control access, but you’re effectively holding their data. If it’s in theirs, you’re working as a collaborator, which can make things cleaner when the engagement ends.

For anything sensitive, it’s usually simpler to set it up in the client’s own workspace from the start. Avoids having to migrate or hand over data later.

Holly @Simple Stack

​@Lyn85 

Are you referring to internal access for your team? Or external access for your clients?

• For your internal team access, you would use Airtable’s interfaces to restrict which records each team member is allowed to see.

• For external client access, you would either use Airtable’s portals add-on, or you can use a 3rd-party portal.
  
  The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
  Zite, JetAdmin, Softr, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

​@Holly Nilson-Clay 

So you mean that it’s the client who would buy the licenses and setup the workspace. And then add our team as users? 

​@ScottWorld It would be a tool for our internal access. Right now, all of the data is stored in an excel stored within the clients sharepoint which we can access using credentials they provided us. All of our team have access to that. So basically we would be moving that excel data which is used only by our team, onto airtable. 

​@Lyn85 

That is the perfect use case for Airtable’s interfaces. No need to use any external portals.

And switching from Excel to Airtable is a fantastic decision!

Just make sure that you only create ONE BASE to store all of your data. You can have multiple tables within that base, but only use one base. Do not spread out your data across multiple bases, which would defeat the purpose of switching from Excel to a powerful database app like Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld