Understanding the CDM client and our cloud platform

CDM has two main components: a local client and a cloud platform with a web-based admin portal (aka Iris) that allows you to configure and manage CDM.

The CDM client

You can install the CDM client on a standalone Windows computer or a Windows Server in a VDI environment or mass-deploy it across your organization via Group Policy, Command-line Interface, or Microsoft Intune. Once you've installed the CDM client, its icon appears in the system tray, allowing you to interact with it directly from there.

Our cloud platform

The second component, our cloud platform, is hosted in Microsoft Azure. We operate across multiple Microsoft Azure data centers in the UK, EU, and USA. You can choose the region that hosts your data.

Our cloud platform deliberately maintains very little access to your corporate data, as we have no visibility into information stored within your Microsoft environment. This means that even in the worst-case scenario involving comprehensive hacking of our cloud platform, your Microsoft 365 tenancy data would remain protected.

Our cloud platform has three main functions. These include license validation, product configuration retrieval, and Microsoft Graph notification subscription and relay service. License validation and product configuration retrieval are both one-off actions performed when you sign in for the first time to map your drives. The Microsoft Graph notification subscription and relay service is an ongoing process rather than a one-off action, as it alerts CDM about changes to files or folders in Microsoft 365. However, it is essential to note that this does not mean that our cloud platform has access to your data.

Our cloud platform merely subscribes CDM users to the Microsoft Graph notification subscription and relay service and receives the information that this service returns on their behalf as an anonymized remote ID, ensuring that your data is encrypted from the get-go. Upon receipt of this information, our cloud service broadcasts it to the CDM client installed on your desktop. The CDM client then communicates with your Microsoft 365 instance to retrieve the changes and updates the impacted files or folders accordingly. At no point in this process will IAM Cloud or our services have any access to your data. For more information about the step-by-step startup flow between CDM, our cloud platform, and Microsoft 365, see CDM interactions.