Upgrading Accelo's Files and Attachments Storage Infrastructure

As a system to run your service business, Accelo provides a mechanism to share and store important files that define the work and the relationships that you have with your clients. Accelo ensures that files and attachments that are shared between you and your clients are stored against the Client or Work Object that it is relevant to, so that those files are easy to find in the future! Storing files and attachments was one of the original features of Accelo to help service businesses manage their Client Work and the same fundamental storage layer has served us well for over 10 years.

Accelo's file storage system architecture was designed before our migration to AWS ecosystem and has soldiered on in the background while many other infrastructure components were upgraded. Meanwhile, our engineers have been keen to re-imagine Accelo's storage layer and leverage the best cloud storage service available to make Files and Attachment storage even better. After months of work behind the scenes preparing the new infrastructure, we are excited to announce that your files are going to be migrated to the AWS Simple Storage Service, more commonly known as AWS S3!

This new infrastructure is going to provide some big benefits for Accelo users, including:

• Robust Interactions: We have streamlined the interaction between the database that drives the web application and how files are stored. There is now a direct relationship between your actual files and the database entry that stores important metadata, like the filename and location of the file inside of Accelo. This means that when you make changes to your files in Accelo, like simply renaming a file or updating folders of invoices when you merge two companies, the storage updates are now much simpler and more robust.
•  Improved Security: Our S3 storage system is configured using AWS's best practice of least privilege access to prevent unauthorized access to your files. This system allows for enhanced encryption using industry standards and your files are only decrypted when one of our authorized servers requests access.
• Durable Storage: Your files are very safe when stored in S3. AWS is proud to proclaim a best-in-class 11 9's durability, that is, S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. At Accelo, the safety of your files is of the utmost importance and the level of data durability that AWS S3 provides is unmatched.
• High Fidelity Backups: Files are stored in S3 as versioned objects, that is, they are effectively automatically backed up every time a change is made to the original file. This means your files are always safe and able to be recovered even if you overwrite it by accidentally uploading a new version of the file with the same name!

The engineering team is ready to go, and your files will be migrated to AWS S3 over the next few months! In fact, the team has finished migrating our internal accounts that we use for testing and training. This migration is designed to be seamless and will have no impact on your user experience or your files. Accelo is built to be able to handle files in both our current system and S3 simultaneously. Have no fear, your files will always be available to you even while your account is in the transition process!

If you have questions about this upgrade or the migration that your Accelo account will experience (but again, there will be no impact to any user experience!), please reach out to your trusted Accelo team member or contact [email protected].