Security

Cerenade houses each customer’s data in its own separate database instead of a shared database between all customers – in IT technical terms, this is referred to as a “single tenancy” data model. This physical isolation of data provides for significantly stronger security postures and a sounder risk mitigation. Note that most case and practice management software vendors do not justify investment in single tenancy models due to increased costs associated with the production environment; however, Cerenade’s eIMMIGRATION, eCMS, and other case and practice management products have leveraged this methodology since their inception and have therefore absorbed additional costs in exchange for delivering superior security to our users.

Regular (at least daily) data backups are critical to ensuring data is recoverable should any be corrupted or lost via an infrastructure failure or natural disaster. Cerenade takes data back-ups for its users a level further by securely replicating their data and backing it up on-the-fly (continuously, at most every 15 minutes) from a primary Microsoft Azure server location to additional server locations in different geographic regions. Note that this is not the same as nightly backups to a remote location, which is a more common industry standard: in the standard scenario, an organization could lose up to a day of work (a large organization with 100 users can lose 100 man-days of work!). On-the-fly data replication, which at most will result in a loss of 15 minutes of work, therefore provides users with much stronger resilience and superior disaster recovery. And though the on-the-fly geo-replication architecture is more costly than the standard alternative, Cerenade justifies the investment to provide best-in-class resilience and recovery to our users.

Forms management, a key component of case management, is conducted on Cerenade’s solutions via our secure internal e-forms engine. Our technology stems from years of development efforts in e-forms end markets other than case management (e.g., enterprise forms management for governmental agencies); therefore, Cerenade is uniquely distinguished in that other case management vendors will commonly rely on third-party e-forms engines. An internal e-forms technology provides for considerably enhanced data security since form data does not need to travel (and potentially be intercepted by a malicious party) between the case management vendor’s infrastructure and a third-party form engine vendor’s infrastructure. Further, once the form data sits within the third-party vendor’s infrastructure, the third-party can exploit the form data for its own benefit, go on to share / sell form data with other (unauthorized) vendors, or in a less malicious case, can have their infrastructure infiltrated and data stolen by a hacker / malware all while the case management user has no idea. Preventing third-party vendors from accessing confidential form data keeps Cerenade liable, and is yet another unique data security advantage offered to product users.

Users of all Cerenade solutions take advantage of advanced authentication for more robust login safeguarding. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is available across platforms and devices with flexible verification delivery options including text and email. Cerenade also allows for convenient single sign-on (SSO) and provides flexible optionality, including Microsoft Azure AD SSO and Google SSO, to many clients with SSO requirements in their organizational policies.

Cerenade products include administrative tools to configure visibility, access, and permissions across users. This can be applied to a variety of data types, including forms, cases, and much more, to enforce information availability on a need-to-know basis.  Admins can also take advantage of role-based permissions (available on both an individual and group level) to seamlessly orchestrate access control across their enterprises.

Cerenade product administrators can require users to set strong passwords and regularly reset passwords at a given interval. After multiple attempts of logging in with an incorrect password, users will be locked out of log-in attempts for a defined period of time, which administrators can bypass.