Data sovereignty
Your office's models describe buildings before they exist. The plan of a bank, the route through a prison, the risers of a data centre. Data sovereignty asks who can reach those files, under which law, and what happens when somebody else decides. This page sets out what has gone wrong for European organisations since 2015, with dates and court cases, and how Syncture answers each.
A region is not a jurisdiction
A server in Frankfurt still answers to the law of the company that runs it.
Most cloud services an office uses are run by companies under US law. Choosing an EU region moves the disks, and the law stays with the company.
Since March 2018 the US CLOUD Act lets American authorities require a provider to hand over data in its possession, custody or control. It applies whether the data is stored inside or outside the United States.
On 18 June 2025 a French Senate inquiry asked Microsoft France's director of public and legal affairs about it, under oath. He said he could not guarantee that data held under French public contracts would never reach US authorities without French consent.
With Syncture
Syncture is run from Vienna, under Austrian and EU law. An account created in Europe keeps its files and its records inside the European Union.
Our host, Cloudflare, is an American company, and the CLOUD Act reaches what it holds. Two kinds of workspace change what an order could produce.
In a workspace created with encryption on, every file is encrypted on your own Windows machines under a key you hold. An order served on Cloudflare or on us could produce those encrypted bytes, and not the key.
In a workspace created with its own storage, the files sit in a bucket your office runs, in a country you choose. Names, paths and sizes stay readable to us in every kind of workspace, and the security page lists them all.
A switch somebody else holds
A service can be withdrawn by a government order your office was never party to.
In May 2025 the Associated Press reported that the email of the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor had been cut off. It followed US sanctions against the court.
Microsoft said it had disconnected the sanctioned official and had never stopped serving the court itself. On 31 October 2025 the court confirmed it would move its office software to openDesk, a suite maintained by Germany's Centre for Digital Sovereignty.
An architecture office is rarely anybody's target. What it shares with the court is the dependence, because its models live behind an account somebody else can close.
With Syncture
Every machine that opens a model keeps it as an ordinary Revit file on its own disk. If our service stopped tomorrow, those files would stay exactly where they are.
Download folder writes a whole workspace to disk as Revit files, whenever you ask. A workspace in your own storage can be rebuilt from a copy of its bucket, every version of every model, with a script we publish.
The ground under every transfer
The legal basis for sending European data to American companies has been struck down twice in five years.
The Court of Justice struck down Safe Harbor in October 2015 and Privacy Shield in July 2020. Both cases were brought by an Austrian, Max Schrems.
In May 2023 Ireland's data protection authority fined Meta €1.2 billion for transfers that had relied on the European Commission's own standard clauses.
The framework in force today was upheld by the General Court in September 2025. An appeal against that judgment was lodged with the Court of Justice in October 2025, as case C-703/25 P.
With Syncture
For an account created in Europe, Syncture stores the files and every name, path, share and invoice in the European Union.
Where Cloudflare processes them for us outside the EEA, the transfer rests on an adequacy decision. Where none applies, it rests on the EU's Standard Contractual Clauses.
A workspace created with its own storage never sends its files through us at all. The add-in on your machines writes them straight to your bucket.
Your client decides where drawings sit
A client's contract can say where its project data may be stored, and the architect is bound by it.
The EU's NIS2 directive requires essential and important entities to manage the security of their supply chains. Hospitals, energy companies and public administrations pass that duty on to their suppliers, architects included.
In September 2025 Austria's armed forces said they were moving about 16,000 workstations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Their IT directorate gave the reason as keeping sensitive data processed internally.
On 2 October 2025 the German state of Schleswig-Holstein finished moving about 30,000 employees off Microsoft's email. An office that works for clients like these inherits their rules.
With Syncture
Every workspace is one of three kinds, chosen when it is made, so each project can follow its own contract.
Stored by Syncture, in the region the account was created in. Or encrypted on your own machines, under a key you hold, in a workspace created with encryption on. Or in a bucket your office runs.
A confidential project can sit in your own bucket while the rest of the office works in ours, in one account and one console.
Priced per head, shared less
When every person costs a licence, offices stop inviting the people who should see the model.
A structural engineer abroad, the client's facility manager, a student on a summer contract. Each one is a seat, so each one gets a PDF by email.
The model splits into copies, and the copies drift apart. Every emailed export is one more place your data lives, outside any contract you signed.
With Syncture
Syncture costs €299 a month for an office of up to 50 people. Everyone you share with outside the office joins free.
So the consultant works in the real model, in Revit, with its whole history, and nobody emails an export to keep them current.
Leaving is the real test
A service shows what it is worth on the day you try to leave it.
Subscriptions lapse, companies are bought and products are retired. Ask any provider what happens to the files on the thirty-first day after the last invoice.
Ask what the files come back as. A folder of exports has lost the history that made the model worth keeping.
With Syncture
Every machine keeps its models as ordinary Revit files, and Download folder writes a whole workspace to disk in one step.
In a workspace in your own storage, every committed version is described in the bucket itself, beside its bytes. Our exit page publishes the formats and three scripts, in Python, PowerShell and C#, that rebuild every version from a copy of the bucket.
The scripts are run against a test bucket before every release, so the way out is checked as often as the way in.
An upgrade nobody asked for
A cloud that stops opening an older Revit release moves the whole team to a new one mid-project.
Revit files only move forward. Once a model is saved in a newer release, it never opens in the older one again.
An upgrade mid-project moves every machine, every consultant and every linked model at once, in a week somebody else chose.
With Syncture
Syncture works with Revit 2021 to 2027, and opening a model never changes its release.
Opening a model in a newer Revit gives that person a detached copy. The team's model moves when your office decides, with Migrate, links and worksets kept.
Your models are not training data
An office's details, families and standards are years of its own knowledge, written into every model.
In June 2024 Adobe rewrote its terms of use after customers read them as letting their work train its AI. Adobe said it had never trained its generative models on customer content.
The lesson for an office is to read what a provider may do with the files, and how much notice it gives before that changes.
With Syncture
Nothing you publish to Syncture trains anything. Production access exists to run the service and to answer support requests you raise.
In a workspace created with encryption on, file contents are unreadable to Syncture and to Cloudflare.
Questions for any provider
Ask them of every service that holds your models, ours included.
Under which country's law is the company that runs the service, and the company that stores the files?
Could an order served on either of them produce your files in a form anybody can read?
Who holds the encryption key, and can the provider open a file without you?
What can the provider's staff see in normal operation, and where is that written down?
What happens to the files on the thirty-first day after the last invoice?
Can you get every version of every model back as files that open without the service?
Can each project choose where its files are stored, to match its client's contract?
Does the price rise with every person who needs to see the model?
Can the provider make your team upgrade Revit, and when did it last do so?
May the provider use your files to train software, and how much notice does it give before its terms change?
Where the facts are kept
- Data locationEuropean accounts are stored entirely in the EU under Cloudflare's jurisdiction. Where every byte sits for accounts on each continent, and who can reach it.
- SecurityAuthorised reads and publishes, HTTPS in transit, encryption at rest, EU jurisdiction, and optional workspace encryption under a key only you hold.
- Your own storageA workspace in a bucket your office runs, on Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or MinIO: the bucket, its credential, and where each machine looks.
- Workspace keysDeploy a workspace key to every Windows machine: the five places Syncture looks, rollouts by Group Policy, Intune or RMM, and what a lost key means.
- Exit planWhat happens to your models if Syncture stops, for each kind of workspace, and the scripts that rebuild every version from a copy of your own bucket.
- ComparedSyncture beside Forma Design Collaboration, Revit Server and file-based worksharing on a LAN or over a VPN: what each gives an office, in Autodesk's own names.