TargetSolutions Security and Availability Features (United States)

Secure and Redundant Platform

TargetSolutions is a cloud application platform used by organizations to manage and deliver high quality training and records management. Our platform allows organizations to focus on training and records management while focusing on cloud infrastructure availability and security of your data. Security of your data and the anytime-availability of our applications is TargetSolutions’ top priority. Our platform is designed to protect customers from threats by applying security using top-tier technology and continually auditing our security. We present the best customer experience and data protection possible.

Overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global Infrastructure

The following was copied from AWS documentation and is useful to understand how the TargetSolutions platform is deployed. Underlined points are particularly meaningful.

“AWS serves over a million active customers in more than 190 countries. We are steadily expanding global infrastructure to help our customers achieve lower latency and higher throughput, and to ensure that their data resides only in the region they specify. As our customers grow their businesses, AWS will continue to provide infrastructure that meets their global requirements. The AWS Cloud infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZs). A Region is a physical location in the world where we have multiple AZs. AZs consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. These AZs offer you the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. The AWS Cloud operates 42 AZs within 16 geographic Regions around the world, with five more Availability Zones and two more Regions coming online in 2017. Each Amazon Region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon Regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. Each AZ is isolated, but the AZs in a Region are connected through low-latency links. AWS provides you with the flexibility to place instances and store data within multiple geographic Regions as well as across multiple Availability Zones within each Region. Each Availability Zone is designed as an independent failure zone. This means that Availability Zones are physically separated within a typical metropolitan region and are located in lower risk flood plains (specific flood zone categorization varies by Region). In addition to discrete uninterruptable power supply (UPS) and onsite backup generation facilities, they are each fed via different grids from independent utilities to further reduce single points of failure. AZs are all redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers."

Here are a few useful links to learn more about AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-overview.pdf
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/Security_Compute_Services_Whitepaper.pdf

TargetSolutions Platform Deployment
Our platform is deployed in the Virginia Region. This region was selected based on availability of all AWS services and superior network latency measures. We have deployed the platform across two different AZ’s in Virginia. The Application tier is deployed in an active-active architecture with customer sessions load balanced across application servers. Each Application server is connected to the Active database and capable of serving all customers. Sufficient capacity is maintained to support failure of any Application server.
The Database tier is deployed in an active-standby configuration in the two different AZ’s. We have 2 database servers that are identical in configuration. The primary server houses the production database that powers our main website. The secondary server is a replica of the primary and is set up as a warm stand by, with continuous replication from the primary server. The replicated data has an extremely short delay given the low latency connectivity between AZ’s (typically well under 1 minute).
In the event of the loss of the active DB, a manual failover occurs where the secondary replica is then transitioned into the primary role with up to a 1 minute data loss. The web application is then pointed to the new database.

Database backups are stored locally and copied nightly to a second AWS region as a third level of recovery in the extraordinarily unlikely event that both independent AZ’s in the Virginia region are out of service a restore from the previous night’s full backup will be applied. Given that these are done nightly there could be maximum data loss of up to 30 hours in this event.

Best in Class Applications

TargetSolutions built its reputation with developing and delivering training solutions as its core platform for enterprise class service, stability and security. With total “encryption in transit” SSL encryption for secure end to end transition of our data, along with “encryption at rest” achieved by utilizing Oracle Advanced Security be confident that your data is private and secure. In addition, the training platform database design authenticates all users and sites with user controlled usernames and password which are encrypted, while also providing the customer with the ability to login with OpenID as an alternative method to authenticate. TargetSolutions personnel have administrative application accounts with unique credentials to track all administrative activities. All production data is replicated in real time to back up servers using Oracle Active Data Guard, which enables zero data loss disaster recovery.