Data Security#

Grist is available as a hosted service (“Grist SaaS”) running on infrastructure managed by Grist Labs. It can also be installed on your own infrastructure (“Self-Managed Grist”). In either case, we take measures to secure your data that you should know about.

Grist SaaS#

Our general privacy policy and terms are at https://www.getgrist.com/privacy and https://www.getgrist.com/terms. In addition, here is a summary of specific measures that relate to Grist documents that we host on your behalf:

  • Grist servers operate in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, in the United States.
  • AWS S3 is used for long-term storage, and stores documents in encrypted form. Data is stored in the United States.
  • Grist employees never look at your data and cannot open your documents. The one exception is if you choose to share a document with customer support in order to get help with an issue.
  • When being operated on, your data will by necessity exist in unencrypted form in some of Grist’s internal systems. Only select key employees have full access to these systems, and policy prohibits them from looking inside documents.
  • Secure HTTPS is used for all access to Grist via public internet (both website and API calls).
  • Regular backups of Grist documents are made, and are stored in encrypted form. Grist retains more frequent snapshots of recent changes, and less frequent ones as you go back in time.
  • If you delete a document, it will persist for 30 days in a Trash folder under your control. At any time a “Delete forever” option can be used to immediately purge a document in this folder. All automatic backups are purged along with the document.

The hosted Grist product has not at this time gone through certification or auditing for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR compliance. If you need specific documentation, please contact customer support. You can also nudge us to prioritize certification over feature development at this issue.

Self-Managed Grist#

For Self-Managed Grist, you are in complete control of where servers operate and where data is stored. Here are some security considerations to bear in mind:

  • Grist software is distributed via the gristlabs organization on github and docker hub. Please exercise diligence if accessing software elsewhere, since the software you install will have full access to your data.
  • Grist documents support powerful Python formulas. Please pay attention to instructions for configuring sandboxing if your team may be working with untrusted documents.
  • Grist by default is welcoming to anonymous users, allowing them to create and edit their own documents. You may wish to configure a stricter arrangement.
  • Grist does not make external services mandatory, since that would introduce unnecessary obstacles in some scenarios. For example, an individual editing a Grist document offline on their own desktop shouldn’t need to install a PostgreSQL database first. But it is important to evaluate what you need in your situation rather than simply sticking with the defaults. Please read about the data Grist stores and your options for where to store it.
  • It is important to keep your Grist installation up to date.