You may have noticed a small change in the appearance of the CloudCalc web site the last time you logged in.  There is now a green padlock and the notation “Secure” to the left of the address bar.  Also the URL name – www.cloudcalc.com – is now preceded by the indicator HTTPS: (Hyper Text Transfer Secure) in place of the previous HTTP:

What does this mean to you, the CloudCalc user?  A couple of things…

On the one hand, the site is now accessed via a different URL.  If you have previously bookmarked the CloudCalc site as http://www.cloudcalc.com, you may wish to change it to https://www.cloudcalc.com.  The old bookmark will still get you to the right site, but now it will have to go through a rerouting process, which may add just the slightest bit of delay.

But the main implication of the HTTPS: prefix is that the site is now more secure.  For those who are not aware, the HTTPS: web protocol provides a more secure experience in two ways.

The first, is that when you visit an HTTPS: site, you can have some confidence that you are dealing with the party with whom you think you are dealing – in other words you are not visiting a phony phishing site.  In order to install an HTTPS site, the site owner (that is us, CloudCalc) has to acquire what is called an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate from a trusted third party source.  In order to qualify for that certificate, we have to prove to that third party source that we really are the organization that we claim to be.

The second way that an HTTPS: site provides a more secure experience for our users is that now everything that passes between your browser and our web server (user identifying information, passwords, structural model data, etc.) is now encrypted.  This prevents any information from being stolen via “man-in-the-middle” attacks or any other type of digital eavesdropping.

So now you can not only be confident in the results you get from a CloudCalc analysis, but you can also have the peace of mind that whatever sensitive data you submit to our app is safe from prying eyes and ears.  This is one more way that we continue to instill confidence in the use of the cloud for your structural engineering needs.

To learn more about CloudCalc, the scalable, collaborative, and mobile cloud-based engineering software, please visit: www.cloudcalc.com – Structural Analysis in the Cloud.

By Tom Van Laan

Copyright © CloudCalc, Inc. 2017