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Privacy

What information can Virtual Climate access?

Virtual Climate does not collect any personal data from users; the only data retained is the email used solely for issuing licences. When users try to run any analyses, the Microclimate Tool checks only that the user has an active licence.


For billing purposes, Virtual Climate uses an API to retrieve the tags and costs for projects by organisation from AWS. This is exactly the same data that users see when they check via the dropdown menu Extensions > MCT > AWS > Check AWS costs and usage. 


In the event that any troubleshooting is required for CFD cases on AWS, our staff are authorized to view relevant information on a call with users’ consent. 

Data Ownership

Who owns the data generated using the Microclimate Tool?

Any and all data, be it models, result sets or data visualisations created by users with the Microclimate Tool is the sole property of users and their organisation.

Data Protection

How is this data protected?

Any projects created using the Microclimate Tool, including geometry or results for radiation and comfort analysis are always stored only on the hard drives or network drives of users. This data cannot be viewed or accessed by Virtual Climate or any third party. The user organisation’s in-house data protection practices will apply to these models and results.


The online CFD analysis is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the EU (Ireland) region. Virtual Climate benefits from the protections and best practices recommended by AWS to ensure security and operational resilience.


To enable data security and privacy for CFD simulations on AWS:

  • Virtual Climate creates individual Virtual Private Clouds or VPCs for each customer of the Microclimate Tool, providing isolation and segregation of data.

  • Admin access may be used only with customer authorisation to view data, if needed for troubleshooting. 

  • When users create a CFD mesh or run simulations, this is done via Virtual Machines (VMs), which are created only when needed for the simulation. This means that every time, they will be assigned a different IP address. Once the simulation is complete, the CFD case is saved in the users’ private cloud storage and the VMs cease to exist.

  • This private storage drive can be accessed only by VM’s launched within the customer VPC. This means that no-one other than licensed users from the organisation can use this data.

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Further details on how VPC’s work can be found at:   https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/infrastructure-security.html
AWS and their processes are ISO certified (ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018) and SOC1-3 compliant.

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