Hosting

By default, all clients are hosted inside one or more of the Terraco data centres located in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. These servers are managed by TaskFlow and we ensure high uptime as well as data replication between these data centres to ensure the best experience for our customers. We use a hardened operating system and are up to date with all of the latest security best practices.

We partner with CloudProx, Hetzner and Microsoft Azure to ensure full data redundancy and always store backups in different locations should a data centre become completely unavailable. All data remains within the borders of South Africa.

We accommodate clients who want to host TaskFlow on premises if there is a good reason for this. In these cases the client needs to provide us with a server and is responsible for securing the server. It is also the client's responsibility to perform hardware maintenance and make daily backups.

Availability SLA

Our server infrastructure will improve over time. At the time of writing we are able to provide a 99.9% uptime to our clients. This excludes the on premise clients since we cannot control all the variables, such as power supply to the server and network uptime.

Availability %	Downtime per year
99	3.65 days
99.9	8.76 hours
99.99	52.56 minutes
99.999	5.26 minutes
99.9999	31.5 seconds

Backups / Disaster Recovery

We keep 7 days full backups for each TaskFlow database. Backups are replicated via a secure channel between regions as well as to a physical location. Backups are made at 02:00 every day. Backups are kept within the borders of South Africa.

Hardware failure

Hard Drives
- RAID configuration ensures data loss is impossible in case of a single drive failure
- Entire drive snapshots are made and securely transferred to a different region
Memory
- Multiple memory modules ensuring no disaster for single failure
Power Supply
- Dual hot-swappable supply ensures uptime even if one power supply fails
Network
- Two physical network cards ensures uptime even if one card fails
- Interfaces are set up in a Linux Bond ensuring automatic fail-over
- Multiple breakout points to the internet are provided via BGP

Disaster recovery

RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Clients will never lose more than 24 hours of data. This will only happen when we are unable to spin up the High Availability server and have to restore your TaskFlow instance from the previous days' backup.
RTO (Recover Time Objective): Clients will be offline for a maximum of 4 hours in case an entire data centre becomes unavailable. This is due to configuration needed in order for the High Availability server to be fully up and running

Servers are constantly monitored and TaskFlow system administrators are notified whenever crucial events occur.

Database security

Your database is only accessible via your TaskFlow URL (e.g. demo.taskflow.co.za). Although all clients' databases run on one cluster there is no data sharing between clients' databases what so ever. Your database is replicated over a secure connection using key pair authentication.

Direct database access (read-only) can be provided to clients who wish to mine their data with BI tools. An email can be sent to support@taskflow.co.za to request access. We will follow the necessary steps to ensure that the person requesting access is authorised to do so.

Password security

Login details are hashed using industry standard hashing techniques. Not even TaskFlow staff has access to your passwords. In the event that a client loses their password, the only option is to send password reset instructions. When logging into TaskFlow, your data is always transmitted via HTTPS. You can verify this from within the browser by making sure that a "lock" icon is present.

Employee access

TaskFlow employees have access to the administrator account on your TaskFlow instance. We may log on from time to time in order to assist with support requests. We use our discretion to only access data that relates to the support request and we have policies in place to ensure that TaskFlow employees do not copy data without authorisation from the client.

System security

Only a select few TaskFlow engineers have access to the server clusters. The only means of logging in is using secure key pair authentication via SSH. We only allow TaskFlow engineers access to the server clusters from our office's location (i.e. no access is granted to any IP address other than our static IP at our office).

We use a hardened Linux distribution as our operating system and have configured our firewall to only allow access on certain ports. Our servers are also resilient against DDoS attacks. We make every best effort to adhere to best practice / standards when securing our network, infrastructure and data.

Software security

TaskFlow as a framework is designed in such a way that it prevents all of the most common types of attacks:

SQL injections are impossible since the ORM ensures that no piece of code can manually execute SQL statements
The framework's templating engine ensures that XSS attacks are impossible by using various techniques such as escaping all data that is rendered
RPC calls do not have access to private methods in the framework
The login page is rendered with a CSRF token which makes Cross Site Request Forgery impossible
All code evaluations are done in a sandboxed environment making RFI attacks impossible

Software updates

All code changes made to the TaskFlow framework is evaluated and reviewed by TaskFlow engineers through a peer review process. In addition, our automated testing platform performs unit tests and code auditing and provides our engineers with reports that are used to determine if changes introduce any bugs or regressions.

Changes are carefully written up and compiled in a new version release document which is distributed to clients prior to deploying new versions. Opportunity for feedback is given and our engineers ensure that upgrades always result in a better product for the user.

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