Overview
At SimpleCitizen we take the protection of customer data extremely seriously. This SimpleCitizen Security Policy describes the organizational and technical measures SimpleCitizen implements platform wide designed to prevent unauthorized access, use, alteration or disclosure of customer data. The SimpleCitizen services operate on Amazon Web Services (“AWS”); this policy describes activities of SimpleCitizen within its instance on AWS unless otherwise specified. As you continue to learn more about SimpleCitizen we recommend you also review our Terms and Conditions of Use and Privacy Policy.
Security Team
Our infrastructure and security team includes people who’ve played lead roles in designing, building, and operating highly secure Internet facing systems at companies ranging from startups to large public companies.
Best Practices
Incident Response Plan
- We have implemented a formal procedure for security events and have educated all our staff on our policies.
- When security events are detected they are escalated to our emergency alias, teams are paged, notified and assembled to rapidly address the event
- After a security event is fixed we write up a post-mortem analysis.
- The analysis is reviewed in person, distributed across the company and includes action items that will make the detection and prevention of a similar event easier in the future.
- SimpleCitizen will promptly notify you in writing upon verification of a security breach of the SimpleCitizen services that affects your data. Notification will describe the breach and the status of SimpleCitizen’s investigation.
Build Process Automation
- We have functioning, frequently used automation in place so that we can safely and reliably rollout changes to both our application and operating platform within minutes.
- We typically deploy code daily, so we have high confidence that we can get a security fix out quickly when required.
Infrastructure
- All of our services run in the cloud. SimpleCitizen does not run our own routers, load balancers, DNS servers, or physical servers.
- All of our services and data are hosted in AWS facilities and protected by AWS security, as described at http://aws.amazon.com/security/sharing-the-security-responsibility. SimpleCitizen services have been built with disaster recovery in mind.
- All of our infrastructure is spread across multiple AWS data centers (availability zones) and will continue to work should any one of those data centers fail unexpectedly. Amazon does not disclose the location of its data centers. As such, SimpleCitizen builds on the physical security and environmental controls provided by AWS. See http://aws.amazon.com/security for details of AWS security infrastructure.
- SimpleCitizen uses a backup solution for datastores that contain customer data.
Data
- SimpleCitizen services and data are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the USA (us-east-1), and multiple other AWS facilities.
- Customer data is stored in multi-tenant datastores; we do not have individual datastores for each customer. However strict privacy controls exist in our application code that are designed to ensure data privacy and to prevent one customer from accessing another customer’s data (i.e., logical separation). We have many unit and integration tests in place to ensure these privacy controls work as expected. These tests are run on a regularly scheduled cadence.
- Each SimpleCitizen system used to process customer data is adequately configured and pathed using commercially-reasonable methods according to industry-recognized system-hardening standards.
- SimpleCitizen engages certain subprocessors to process customer data. These subprocessors are listed at https://www.simplecitizen.com/security-third-parties/, as may be updated by SimpleCitizen from time to time.
Data Transfer
- All data sent to or from SimpleCitizen is encrypted in transit using 256-bit encryption.
- Our API and application endpoints are TLS/SSL only. This means we only use strong cipher suites and have secrecy & security features fully enabled.
- We also encrypt data at rest using an industry-standard AES-256 encryption algorithm.
Authentication
- SimpleCitizen is served 100% over https.
- There are no corporate resources or additional privileges from being on SimpleCitizen’s network.
- We have two-factor authentication (2FA) and strong password policies on GitLab, Google, AWS, and SimpleCitizen to ensure access to cloud services are protected.
Permissions and Admin Controls
- SimpleCitizen enables permission levels to be set for any employees with access to SimpleCitizen.
- Permissions and access can be set to include app settings, user data, or the ability to send/edit manual messages and auto messages.
Application Monitoring
- On an application level, we produce audit logs for all activity, ship logs to our service providers for analysis, and for archival purposes.
- All access to SimpleCitizen applications is logged and audited.
- All actions taken on production consoles or in the SimpleCitizen application are logged.
Security Audits and Certifications
All payment instrument processing for purchase of the SimpleCitizen services is performed by Stripe. For more information on Stripe’s security practices, please see https://stripe.com/docs/security/stripe.
Customer Responsibilities
- Managing your own account, data, documents and information from within the SimpleCitizen services.
- Protecting your own account and user credentials by using two-factor authentication when you are accessing the SimpleCitizen services if possible.
- Compliance with the terms of your services agreement with SimpleCitizen, including with respect to compliance with laws.
- Promptly notifying SimpleCitizen if your user credentials have been compromised or if you suspect possible suspicious activities that could negatively impact security of the SimpleCitizen services or your account.
- You may not perform any security penetration tests or security assessment activities without the express advance written consent of SimpleCitizen.