Overview

We respect your privacy and take significant efforts to protect all your data. We would never do anything with your data that we wouldn’t be proud to tell the world about.

Keeping our customers' data secure is the most important thing that Alpaka does. We go to considerable lengths to ensure that all data sent to Alpaka is handled securely - keeping Alpaka secure is fundamental to our business.

As you continue to learn more about Alpaka we recommend you also review our Terms 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 large public web applications.

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.

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 dozens of times a day, 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. Alpaka does not run our own routers, load balancers, DNS servers, or physical servers.
  • The vast majority of our services and data are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the Ireland West facility. Alpaka services have been built with disaster recovery in mind.
  • All of our infrastructure is spread across 3 AWS data centers (availability zones) and will continue to work should any one of those data centers fail unexpectedly.
  • All of our servers are within our own virtual private cloud (VPC) with network access control lists (ACL’s) that prevent unauthorized requests getting to our internal network.
  • Alpaka uses AWS Aurora's Snapshots as a backup solution for datastores that contain customer data.

Service Levels

We have uptime of 99.9% or higher.

Data

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 to ensure data privacy and prevent one customer from accessing another customers data. We have many unit and integration tests in place to ensure these privacy controls work as expected. These tests are run each time our codebase is updated and even one single test failing will prevent new code being shipped to production.

Data Transfer

All data sent to or from Alpaka is encrypted in transit using 256 bit encryption.

Our API and application endpoints are TLS/SSL only and score an "A+" rating on SSL Labs' tests. This means we only use strong cipher suites and have features such as HSTS and Perfect Forward Secrecy fully enabled.

Authentication

  • Alpaka is served 100% over https. Alpaka runs a zero-trust corporate network.
  • There are no corporate resources or additional privileges from being on Alpaka’s network.

Permissions and Admin Controls

  • Alpaka enables permission levels to be set for any employees with access to Alpaka.
  • Permissions and access can be set to include app settings, billing, 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 Logentries for analysis, and use S3/Glacier for archival purposes.
  • All access to Alpaka applications is logged and audited.
  • Identity service providers are used to login to devices.
  • All actions taken on production consoles or in the Alpaka application are logged.

Security Audits

  • We bi-annually engage with well-regarded third-party auditors to audit our code-base, and work with them to resolve potential issues.

GDPR

Alpaka’s internal systems, policies and processes are in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

We have also built features that allow our customers to achieve GDPR compliance quite easily. These include but are not limited to:

  • User roles that allow you to limit access to data.
  • An extensive system settings page to control your data.

PCI Obligations

Alpaka is not subject to PCI obligations. All payment instrument processing is outsourced to Stripe.