Hornbill Data Assurity

This service is no longer available. Should you require this please speak to your account manager to discuss your requirements

Overview

The Hornbill Data Assurity service, is a chargeable subscription option that provides customers with assurance that their data remains their data, regardless of their Hornbill subscription status or the trading condition of Hornbill. In traditional on-premise deployments, a customer always had access to their data, most often the server, the database and files on the server that made up the customers data, so being sure that they had control of their data was easy. When using Software as a Service though, the data sits in the cloud on servers that are controlled by the service provider so in unforeseen circumstances its theoretically possible for a customer to lose control of their data which may be an unacceptable level of business risk. To help address this and provide customers who need that level of risk mitigation we offer the Hornbill Data Assurity service which is available as an option to Hornbill customers.

How it Works

The goal of this service to to ensure that any customer signed up to the Hornbill Data Assurity service has access to their data in a form that is independent of the service provider (Hornbill in this instance). The principle is simple, the customer provides Hornbill with access credentials to a system that we can deposit files, typically an Amazon S3 bucket is a cost effective, independent solution for this, but can equally be any S3 compatible storage solution (or any secure file access SCP/SSH to a remote server). The important thing though is this storage is in the total control of the customer and not Hornbill, we are simply given the access we need to upload files. Using the credentials we will perform a snapshot of the customers entire data set once a month, encrypt it and drop this data onto the storage that you have provided, and send you an e-mail with the information about each data drop.

Technical Info

The Hornbill service is a multi-tenant architecture but each customer instance data is a fully isolated data set made up of a MySQL database and a file store. When we perform a data drop for this service, we take a full and consistent snapshot of the database and the file store, compress and archive those files using ZIP compression, encrypt the archive with a randomly generated key and then drop the archive into the provided storage. An email is then sent to the primary technical contact for the instance containing information about the data drop along with the key required to unencrypted the content.