Backup Policy
Updated: March 04, 2022
Your Data Storage
For customers of fund administration software, a choice of location may be available at the time of onboarding. For all locations, your data is stored on AWS data centers. As of this date, AWS (i) has certifications for compliance with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, 27017:2015 and 27018:2014, (ii) is certified as a PCI DSS 3.2 Level 1 Service Provider, and (iii) undergoes SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 audits (with semi-annual reports). For detailed information, please see ‘Data Centers and Location’ on the security page above or read about AWS compliances here.
Your Data Back-ups
For customers of fund administration software, monthly data backups are typically included in your subscription, while daily data backups (business days) are available for a fee. The current process involves taking a full backup. Please note that data is only backed up if there is a difference in checksum from the last available backup.
Location of Your Data Back-ups
For customers of fund administration software, a choice of a data backup location may be presented to you at the time of onboarding. As with other data, backups are stored on AWS data centers with the same compliances as mentioned above.
Durability of Your Data Back-ups
For customers of fund administration software, your data is backed-up data in a dedicated AWS S3 bucket. The durability provided by AWS S3 is designed to be 99.999999999% (11 9's). To achieve this durability, AWS S3 storage layers ‘redundantly store your objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones (AZs) in an Amazon S3 Region’. Read more on AWS S3 FAQ.
Data Backup Retention
The last backup is always retained as long as your subscription plan is active. Historical backups are rotated through different storage classes depending upon their age before they’re finally expired after 90 days (or longer if you have a custom backup plan). All storage classes provide the same high durability but differ in time to availability.
Disaster Recovery
Backups are the first and preferred mechanism for disaster recovery related to data. Other methods may be available depending upon the nature of the disruption.
To protect against natural disasters, we recommend customers choose different locations for their data and backups. However, even if backups happen in the same region, AWS S3 stores data in multiple redundant availability zones so that any events related to a single availability zone are still mitigated.
If a disaster is declared, we aim to recover data till the last data backup of the client (RPO) and restore availability within 1 business day (RTO). Note that a disaster is only declared under these circumstances: (a) the service isn’t available for more than 10% of our customers, (b) a core feature or component is down, (c) a primary workflow is disrupted. A disaster will be declared only when the situation is unlikely to be resolved in a predefined time frame.
FAQs
What Happens If a Backup Fails?
If a backup fails for any reason, we’re able to see failures on our centralized log management tool. We also receive alerts so that our production team is notified in the event our log management tool detects an error with a backup.
Can I Do a Back-up Myself?
It is easy to export your data in an Excel format through user designed custom reports. In this case, you always have a copy of your data in a readable and useful format.
Advanced users with API access can use a third party tool to backup their data too.
Can I See The Technical Details Of The Backup Process?
Backups are scheduled to happen automatically periodically without human intervention. We’ve open-sourced reference code for our backup containers. For a technical reference to the backup process, please see our open source code for backup containers available on Github and DockerHub.
How Long Does It Take To Restore From a Backup?
Because of the resilience of the underlying infrastructure, the need for data restoration from backups is unlikely and rare. Nevertheless, should such an event occur, we’re able to restore the last backup quickly within the SLAs per your support plan.
Do You Do Restoration Tests?
We test the backup restoration process every quarter.