help | clarity accounting

security

Q: How secure is Clarity Accounting?

An important concern when storing financial data online is security.  Security comes in three parts:

  1. Can any unauthorized users access my data?
  2. Will my data be available when I need it?
  3. Can I export my data?

Preventing Unauthorized Access

Securing data from unauthorized access has been at the top of our minds when choosing the technology for Clarity Accounting.  The following technology choices were made based on the requirement for security.
  1. Java EE - Java is technology for creating software which has the best reputation for security; because of the way web software is built in Java, it lacks the vulnerabilities that are commonly found when using other web technologies (especially the most popular, like PHP).
  2. SSL - Also called “HTTPS”, this technology encrypts all communication between your web browser and our application, making it almost impossible for anyone to try and “eavesdrop” on your passwords and data when you log in.
  3. Security Scanning - Our web site has been scanned for known security vulnerabilities by a third party scanner approved by the credit card companies (called a PCI scanner) and passed the tests.
  4. Seperate Virtual Machines - Our blog, our main web site, and the application are kept seperate using a virtual machine technology from 3Tera, called AppLogic.  This protects the secure parts of the application from the less secure technologies used for our blog and web site;  even if someone hacks into the blog somehow they can only access and change our blog posts, not your financial data.
  5. Firewalls - Our data center provides triple layer firewall protection, including active intrusion detection systems.
Hackers don’t only try to access data from the outside, however; they may attempt to actually break in and access the data on the actual computer.  Not to worry - we’re not storing your data in some insecure office space!  Our data center has many security features, including:
  • 24×7 security guards at entrance with full video facilities inspection
  • Two-layer building security provided by key cards with electronic logging and video surveillance (biometrics at network access point in Market Post Tower)
  • Locked private cabinets for all our equipment accessible only to duly authorized personnel
The last component of protecting your data from unauthorized access we must leave to you - please choose a strong password! The most common means by which data is compromised is by using an obvious or easy to guess password.  See our tips on password management for more about this.

Ensuring Data Availability

According to our Service Level Agreement (SLA) we guarantee no more than one hour of service interruption in a month, or you get the next month for free!  It’s important to us that we maintain 100% uptime.  Thus, except for planned maintenance and upgrades, we’ve taken measures to ensure that the service is reliable and always available, including:
  1. Reliable Data Center - instead of running the service out of an ordinary office, we use a data center that provides a 100% uptime guarantee, refunding ten times our fee for any unplanned downtime.  By sharing a data connection with thousands of other sites, we know that we won’t be the only ones who are upset if that connection fails.  To maintain this uptime, the data center has multiple redundant internet connections, redundant routers, and power generators.
  2. Grid Technology - 3tera AppLogic is a “grid computing” technology, which means that the software is distributed over several computers.  If one computer dies (as computers do), another one picks up where it left off.   The broken computer is replaced in a matter of hours, but Clarity Accounting is back up and running within minutes.

Data Export

As small business accounting software, Clarity Accounting is well suited to small businesses.  But what if your business grows and Clarity Accounting isn’t meeting your needs?  Or you just like to keep a copy of the data, “just in case”?
You are able to export your business data at any time into Excel. Please refer to the following help file on instructions on how to export data onto your hard drive:
We do not believe in holding our customer’s data in order to keep them as customers. We believe it is really important that customers know that they can have an Excel backup of their data. We know that if we were customers, that would be how we would prefer things to be done.

Conclusion

I hope this has answered your questions and concerns about the security of Clarity Accounting; if not, please contact us!  We love to hear from our customers.