Business continuity

Where the service runs

Ceidwad runs entirely on Microsoft Azure in the UK South region. The application and the database are managed Azure services rather than servers we maintain, so the platform itself is patched and kept available by Microsoft. Core platform data at rest is held in the UK. Our privacy notice is the authority on where data is processed, including the one place where processing may happen outside the UK.

Backups

• The database is backed up continuously, with 35 days of point-in-time recovery. We can restore the service to any moment inside that window.
• Backups are held in Azure UK South. Geo-redundant backup is not enabled — see our resilience position for why, and what that does and does not mean.
• Backups are encrypted at rest. A record you delete may persist in a backup until that backup expires; the privacy notice states the period.

Getting your data out

You do not need our permission or our help to get your own records out of Ceidwad, and you can do it at any point during the contract rather than only at the end. Today that is:

• Your audit log as a CSV, from your account area. It is bounded and the file says so on its own first line if the record has been cut short — a truncated export that did not admit it would be worse than no export.
• Your asset and contract registers as CSVs.
• Your response plan, governor pack, reports and incident records as PDF or Word documents, generated on demand.

There is no single “export everything” button yet. If you want a complete copy of your tenant’s data in one go, ask us and we will produce it — we would rather say that plainly than imply a feature that does not exist.

If we are unavailable

Ceidwad is currently run by one person, and we are not going to dress that up. What exists today:

• The service does not depend on anyone being at a desk. It runs on managed Azure services, the daily checks run as scheduled jobs, and nothing about ordinary operation requires a person to start it each morning. An absence does not take the product offline.
• Administrative access does not sit behind a single login. A separate emergency administrator account exists on our Azure tenant, so the infrastructure is reachable without one individual’s credentials.
• The procedures are written down, not remembered — the architecture, the production resources, the deployment and the database restore all have documentation, and the restore runbook has been executed and timed.

What does not exist yet, stated because you would be right to ask: nobody other than the founder has executed these procedures. They are documented rather than rehearsed by a second person, and formal arrangements — source code escrow, a named technical deputy — are not in place. We assessed this ourselves in August rather than waiting to be asked, and closing it is live work rather than a plan. If continuity of supply is a material part of your decision, ask us where it has got to before you sign anything.

If you leave

Where you hold a signed agreement with us, that agreement and its data processing terms govern what happens at the end of the contract. Our standing position, which those terms reflect:

• Your data is yours. You may export it at any time during the contract, and we will help you get a complete copy at the end of it.
• After the relationship ends we delete tenant data on the schedule our privacy notice sets out, other than records we are required to keep — for example an incident record that has been cited to the Information Commissioner, which cannot be deleted and is archived instead.
• We do not hold your data hostage to a renewal, and we do not charge for an export.

Questions

Continuity questions from procurement go to security@ceidwad.co.uk. If the honest answer is that something is not in place yet, that is the answer you will get.