HACKER Q&A
📣 iraldir

Best service to upload user documents securely?


Hi everyone, as part of a side project SAAS I'm building, I want my user to be able to upload documents (PDF files of up to 4 pages I would imagine). Those document can contain sensitive and personal information, so I'd rather not have them on my server for security reasons. Ideally, I'd like an API from a third party service which allows me to integrate a document upload and retrieval from the interface of my webapp, without those documents going to my server.

I must not be searching for the correct thing as I fail to find even one service doing that.

Any advice?

  👤 Jugurtha Accepted Answer ✓
Maybe you can have Google Drive, Box, Dropbox integrations. You could then request permissions via oauth and upload / retrieve document on the user's behalf. This also allows users to upload/read documents using said applications application and yours.

User visits your site and wants to upload a document. They see the logos for Box, Dropbox, Drive, and click on whichever they prefer/have an account for. You authenticate then upload the document to a specific folder in a specific namespace in that drive (user_drive_box_dropbox/acme_saas/foo.pdf).

For people who don't have an account in any, you can use the same integration to upload documents to your drive's acme_saas_drive/user_id/foo.pdf.

This way users have control over their data, and you fan out adding integrations one after the other.

👤 dmarlow
S3, Blob Storage?