Adviser CRM is a technology partner of Zoho Corporation and Adviser CRM is hosted on the Zoho Developer Platform.  One of the driving factors to partner with Zoho was the Zoho was the infrastructure and security provided by Zoho on their Developer Platform.

Below is a security statement from our partner Zoho Corporation (Zoho) that applies to the infrastructure that your data is hosted on.

Adviser CRM does not have access to any of your client data at any time.

At Zoho, we take data security very seriously. That's why we have gotten certified for industry standards such as ISO27001:2013 and SOC 2 Type II. We have taken steps to implement appropriate administrative, technical & physical safeguards to prevent unauthorized access, use, modification, disclosure or destruction of the information you entrust to us.

If you have any concerns regarding the security of your data, we encourage you to email us at support@advisercrm.co.nz

Zoho provides Software as a Service (SaaS) products to millions of users worldwide to solve their business problems. Security is a key component in our offerings, and is reflected in our people, process, and products. This page covers topics like data security, operational security, and physical security to explain how we offer security to our customers.

At our Data Centers, a co-location provider takes responsibility of the building, cooling, power, and physical security, while we provide the servers and storage. Access to the Data Centres is restricted to a small group of authorized personnel.

Any other access is raised as a ticket and allowed only after the approval of respective managers. Additional two-factor authentication and biometric authentication are required to enter the premises. Access logs, activity records, and camera footage are available in case an incident occurs.

Zoho have best-in-class datacentres across the globe. When you sign up for Adviser CRM, your data is stored in the United States in a Primary Data Centre in Washington and there is also a Secondary Data Centre in Dallas.

Our network security and monitoring techniques are designed to provide multiple layers of protection and defence. We use firewalls to prevent our network from unauthorized access and undesirable traffic. Our systems are segmented into separate networks to protect sensitive data. Systems supporting testing and development activities are hosted in a separate network from systems supporting Zoho's production infrastructure.

We monitor firewall access with a strict, regular schedule. A network engineer reviews all changes made to the firewall every day. Additionally, these changes are reviewed every three months to update and revise the rules.

Our dedicated Network Operations Centre team monitors the infrastructure and applications for any discrepancies or suspicious activities. All crucial parameters are continuously monitored using our proprietary tool and notifications are triggered in any instance of abnormal or suspicious activities in our production environment.

All the components of our platform are redundant. We use a distributed grid architecture to shield our system and services from the effects of possible server failures. If there's a server failure, users can carry on as usual because their data and Zoho services will still be available to them.

We additionally use multiple switches, routers, and security gateways to ensure device-level redundancy. This prevents single-point failures in the internal network.

We use technologies from well-established and trustworthy service providers to prevent DDoS attacks on our servers. These technologies offer multiple DDoS mitigation capabilities to prevent disruptions caused by bad traffic, while allowing good traffic through. This keeps our websites, applications, and APIs highly available and performing.

All servers provisioned for development and testing activities are hardened (by disabling unused ports and accounts, removing default passwords, etc.). The base Operating System (OS) image has server hardening built into it, and this OS image is provisioned in the servers, to ensure consistency across servers.

Our intrusion detection mechanism takes note of host-based signals on individual devices and network-based signals from monitoring points within our servers. Administrative access, use of privileged commands, and system calls on all servers in our production network are logged.

Rules and machine intelligence built on top of this data give security engineers warnings of possible incidents. At the application layer, we have our proprietary WAF which operates on both whitelist and blacklist rules.

At the Internet Service Providers (ISP) level, a multi-layered security approach is implemented with scrubbing, network routing, rate limiting, and filtering to handle attacks from network layer to application layer. This system provides clean traffic, reliable proxy service, and a prompt reporting of attacks, if any.

Every change and new feature is governed by a change management policy to ensure all application changes are authorised before implementation into production.

Our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) mandates adherence to secure coding guidelines, as well as screening of code changes for potential security issues with our code analyser tools, vulnerability scanners, and manual review processes.

Our robust security framework based on OWASP standards, implemented in the application layer, provides functionalities to mitigate threats such as SQL injection, Cross site scripting and application layer DOS attacks.

Our framework distributes and maintains the cloud space for our customers. Each customer's service data is logically separated from other customers' data using a set of secure protocols in the framework. This ensures that no customer's service data becomes accessible to another customer.

The service data is stored on our servers when you use our services. Your data is owned by you, and not by Zoho or Adviser CRM. We do not share this data with any third-party without your consent.

In transit: All customer data transmitted to our servers over public networks is protected using strong encryption protocols. We mandate all connections to our servers use Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2/1.3) encryption with strong ciphers, for all connections including web access, API access, our mobile apps, and IMAP/POP/SMTP email client access.

This ensures a secure connection by allowing the authentication of both parties involved in the connection, and by encrypting data to be transferred. Additionally for email, our services leverages opportunistic TLS by default. TLS encrypts and delivers email securely, mitigating eavesdropping between mail servers where peer services support this protocol.

We have full support for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) with our encrypted connections, which ensures that even if we were somehow compromised in the future, no previous communication could be decrypted. We have enabled HTTP Strict Transport Security header (HSTS) to all our web connections. This tells all modern browsers to only connect to us over an encrypted connection, even if you type a URL to an insecure page at our site.

Additionally, on the web we flag all our authentication cookies as secure.

At rest: Sensitive customer data at rest is encrypted using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The data that is encrypted at rest varies with the services you opt for. We own and maintain the keys using our in-house Key Management Service (KMS). We provide additional layers of security by encrypting the data encryption keys using master keys. The master keys and data encryption keys are physically separated and stored in different servers with limited access.

We hold the data in your account as long as you choose to use Adviser CRM. Once you terminate your user account, your data will get deleted from the active database during the next clean-up that occurs once every 6 months.

The data deleted from the active database will be deleted from backups after 3 months. In case of your unpaid account being inactive for a continuous period of 120 days, we will terminate it after giving you prior notice and option to back-up your data.

A verified and authorized vendor carries out the disposal of unusable devices. Until such time, we categorize and store them in a secure location. Any information contained inside the devices is formatted before disposal. We degauss failed hard drives and then physically destroy them using a shredder. We crypto-erase and shred failed Solid State Devices (SSDs).

We scan all user files using our automated scanning system that’s designed to stop malware from being spread through Zoho's ecosystem. Our custom anti-malware engine receives regular updates from external threat intelligence sources and scans files against blacklisted signatures and malicious patterns. Furthermore, our proprietary detection engine bundled with machine learning techniques, ensures customer data is protected from malware.

Zoho supports Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) as a way to prevent spam. DMARC uses SPF and DKIM to verify that messages are authentic. We also use our proprietary detection engine for identifying abuse of Zoho services like phishing and spam activities. Additionally, we have a dedicated anti-spam team to monitor the signals from the software and handle abuse complaints.

Backup

We run incremental backups every day and weekly full backups of our databases using Zoho Admin Console (ZAC) for Zoho's DCs. Backup data in the DC is stored in the same location and encrypted using AES-256 bit algorithm. We store them in tar.gz format. All backed up data are retained for a period of three months.

If a customer requests for data recovery within the retention period, we will restore their data and provide secure access to it. The timeline for data restoration depends on the size of the data and the complexity involved.

To ensure the safety of the backed-up data, we use a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) in the backup servers. All backups are scheduled and tracked regularly. In case of a failure, a re-run is initiated and is fixed immediately. The integrity and validation checks of the full backups are done automatically by the ZAC tool.

From your end, we strongly recommend scheduling regular backups of your data by exporting it from Adviser CRM and storing it locally in your infrastructure.  You can download all of your data and file attachments free of charge twice every month.

Application data is stored on resilient storage that is replicated across data centres. Data in the primary DC is replicated in the secondary in near real time. In case of failure of the primary DC, secondary DC takes over and the operations are carried on smoothly with minimal or no loss of time. Both the centres are equipped with multiple ISPs.

We have power back-up, temperature control systems and fire-prevention systems as physical measures to ensure business continuity. These measures help us achieve resilience. In addition to the redundancy of data, we have a business continuity plan for our major operations such as support and infrastructure management.

We have a dedicated incident management team. We notify you of the incidents in our environment that apply to you, along with suitable actions that you may need to take. We track and close the incidents with appropriate corrective actions.

Whenever applicable, we will identify, collect, acquire and provide you with necessary evidence in the form of application and audit logs regarding incidents that apply to you. Furthermore, we implement controls to prevent recurrence of similar situations.

We respond to the security or privacy incidents you report to us through support@advisercrm.co.nz with high priority. For general incidents, we will notify users through our blogs, forums, and social media.

For incidents specific to an individual user or an organization, we will notify the concerned party through email (using their primary email address of the Organisation administrator registered with us).

As data controllers, we notify the concerned Data Protection Authority of a breach within 72 hours after we become aware of it, according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Depending on specific requirements, we notify the customers too, when necessary. As data processors, we inform the concerned data controllers without undue delay.