PTC IoT Academic Program - Questions and Answers

Hi,

     Below you have answers to your questions:

Hosted Application Questions

What type of facility is the production equipment housed in?

The instance is running within a Secure Amazon Web Services Data Center in The North East Region of the United States. PTC manages the instances.

What are the security arrangements for the facility?

Our Security systems follow the ISO 27001 framework.  We have an Information Security Management System (ISMS) that consists of a comprehensive set of policies and procedures covering all aspects of Information Security.

Are they in place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?

Yes

What are the virus protection arrangements?

We can configure Anti-Virus software as needed.

On what type of infrastructure do you host data?

VM’s running Linux

Do you contract with an independent third party vendor to receive periodic external and internal vulnerability scans?

Yes

How often do you back up data and where are the backups stored?

Daily and the backups are stored in AWS S3 storage in both a separate Availability Zone and Region.

What level of data encryption do you use to protect website transactions?

The data is encrypted using Standard HTTPS/TLS protocols.

• Uses standard PKI infrastructure for certificate validation
• TLS 1.x support -Supports both client and server certificate validation
• 128 Bit AES encryption or higher (configurable set of ciphers supported)
• FIPS validated ciphers supported

Does your data center have redundant power supplies, generator backups, to avoid consequences from a power failure?

Yes

What mechanisms are in place to guarantee the return of our data in the event of a bankruptcy or other business shutdown or turnover?  

Data can be extracted out of the ThingWorx instance.

Can we escrow your software?

No

Is your server farm scalable to quickly meet a sudden increase in demand?

1. Yes.  We have significant resources available through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

What is your back up process and where do you store the backups?

Backups are performed nightly as AWS Snapshots to S3 storage.  The S3 storage is replicated to an alternate Availability Zone and alternate Region.

Can I export my data in a format that I can easily re-use?

Yes

Who can access our data under what conditions?

Only Cloud Services administrators with a need to access the system are allowed access.

Is my data replicated in other data centers?

Backups are stored to an alternate Availability Zone (data center) as well as an alternate Region.

Is it my own server or is it segregated and if so how is it secured.

Running on VM’s dedicated to your instance.  The VM’s run on shared physical hardware.

Do you conduct regular security audits? 

Yes

Can we review the latest one?

You can create a case to request information through the PTC Support system

Because Flash is not supported on IOS devices, how does your software function on these type of mobile devices?

We have an iOS SDK on which we build the mobile apps.

Does your mobile website use HTML5?

Yes

Disability Questions

At the very least, the web content should be made accessible to a visually-impaired student in the following ways:

1.  Any links to web site material should be clearly denoted and easily accessed by the student

All current links are clearly on the thingworx.com web site. Are there examples that you believe are not clear?

2.  Files within links should be in either Microsoft Word document format, or text format.  Although PDF files can work, they are not consistently accessible.  Scanned PDF files can be read with some speech screen reading programs, but often contain errors which make reading difficult.

At this time we have chosen to post in pdf. But we will take into consideration your suggestion to post in both pdf and word formats.

3.  Any graphics should have accompanying explanations, so that the visually-impaired user understands what the graphics are intended to communicate.

While we tried to incorporate explanations of our graphics in our first release, support for visually-impaired was not an immediate priority. We will look at that for future releases.

4. In addition, it should be noted that Blind users DO NOT and CANNOT use a mouse to navigate the screen. Hot key commands must be available to access the various sections of what is being shown on the screen. What options do you have?

See the answer above.

5. How will tech support be made available to deal with these and other accessibility-related issues if a particular vendor’s product is chosen?

All users are asked to submit technical support questions to the IoT Community Site on the Academic Forum. We will do all we can to support those who are visually-impaired and those who speak different language. It is our goal to support everybody from the education community.

Best regards,

Adrian