Rockport: The Leading Edge in Tech-Enabled Commercial Real Estate Software

Rockport takes data security very seriously. We understand that every year there are more and more breaches that are happening to large institutions and that this is in the forefront of all of our clients’ thoughts when they're going to look at a platform to bring in-house to use. We understand that your clients that use your systems are also concerned about what happens to their data. So the trust and integrity around that is very important. I think a lot of the breaches occur when you don't have strong controls around what's happening with your data in an organization.

So, a company that may have many disparate systems that are not connected, that are not monitored, you really don't know what's happening with your data. There's also a human element to it. you know, people make mistakes. So, if you don't have tight controls and systems that are managing the flow of this data, someone can, you know, unintentionally, make you more vulnerable. So, those are things that we really look at as we build our system, but also as we integrate with all of your internal systems, upstream and downstream, that we need to ensure that we are kind of managing the data effectively through that pipeline, you know where it's coming from and you know where it's going.

So, I mean, obviously, data security is a risk, but also a risk is if you're not managing the data effectively, the quality of that data could be impacted, either through some malicious action you're unaware you know, someone's augmenting your data, or just through not understanding what the overall business processes are. The Rockport platform is hosted in AWS. We picked AWS as our cloud provider because they are the premier provider in the cloud space from a security perspective, you know, from a scalability, and resiliency....

So, we understand those are extremely important, and we wanted to really deliver an enterprise system that would maintain that type of high level of integrity around performance, resilience, but all the security controls that AWS invests a lot of money in. Part of our SOC is ensuring that we are training our staff, that we are working and monitoring the types of activities they're doing to ensure that we're in compliance with that data custody. So, we spend a lot of time training, not only on security-type events where people can be impacted.

You could get a virus locally. You could have a phishing email that gets you to try to take an action. So, we work with our staff to ensure that they understand they could be the cause of a breach, unintentionally, but we're also kind of training them to understand what they're doing with either the client's data or their confidential information. And so, that is an important part of ensuring that we can support the client, but we can also support them in ways that are secure.

We support single sign-on with all of our corporate clients, so, we understand that they may need to manage the authentication and authorization to the system. We also have security controls to ensure that clients can access the system just from their secure environments or, if they wish, on the go and we ensure that they're connecting securely from anywhere that they need to access the system. Excel integration is one of the big areas where people may want to do, download, do some work, and then push that back to the system.

You know, we understand that that is something that they’re going to need to be able to do anywhere. So, we've built a lot of controls. You know, early on, as we were building out the product, we understood that enterprise software, the value to our clients is having it be in a position where they can get access to their data and do the type of analysis they need, and not have that be a closed system. So, we understand that they need to integrate with all their upstream and downstream systems, that could be servicing systems, accounting systems, other reporting systems, or other lines of business where they want to do aggregate reporting.

So, we've really structured these products in a way where that integration of data and features is seamless to the users, so they're not locked into one system where they have to take a lot of time trying to get the data out themselves and join it with other analysis they're doing. So, you know, enterprise software only works if people are doing all of their work in it and not spending more time outside trying to cobble together other systems. You Know, security is an ever-evolving area.

You know, we understand that the vulnerabilities of today won't necessarily be the vulnerabilities of tomorrow. So, we really try to partner with our clients to ensure, as they're seeing things pop up in the market, concerns, risks, that we're taking those into account as we design future features and as we're integrating with all the systems they need. Rockport is the enterprise system for commercial real estate. We understand that, you know, clients need to analyze from, you know, the bonds, to the loans, to the properties, to the underlying financials.

We've really built a set of products that allow you to do all of that type of analysis. I think Rockport was designed understanding that businesspeople are using the system not technical people. So, we really have tried to develop a set of tools that are user-friendly, easy to gain access to your data to do the analysis, that you need to do, without having to jump through massive hoops or manage very technical processes. That's why we exist is to ensure that the tools run, they process data, and allow you to really productize your own data, understand what you have.

Data is really the thing that we understand extremely well.