Security and your data
Safe with us. Yours to take.
SOS holds some of the most sensitive records a school keeps. Here is how they are protected, backed up and kept under the school’s control.
Security
Protected at every layer.
Cyber Essentials Plus
Independently certified, with a written policy for fixing critical and high vulnerabilities and dependencies audited every day.
Hosted in the EU
Run on Amazon Web Services in Ireland, with every connection encrypted and secure cookies throughout.
No passwords to steal
Staff sign in with their school Google account or Realsmart, and repeated failed sign-ins raise an alert.
Roles and permissions
Pages and actions are gated by permission, and schools build the roles that fit their staff.
A tamper-proof audit log
Who changed, viewed or downloaded what, and when, kept for six years. The database itself refuses to edit it or delete it early.
A plan for the worst day
A written incident process, a way to sign everyone at a school out at once, and a commitment to tell you quickly.
Backups and resilience
Backed up every night, and proven to restore.
A backup only counts if it restores. So every month we restore every school’s latest backup and check it, table by table and row by row.
- Nightly backups of every school, locked so that nobody can delete them for 35 days.
- A monthly restore test of every school, recorded with its result.
- A nightly integrity check that looks for missing or damaged records and tells us at once.
- Monitoring every five minutes, with a public status page.
| Database | Tables | Rows | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oakfield Primary | 104 | 512,300 | Passed |
| Hillside Academy | 104 | 1,408,900 | Passed |
| Riverside Juniors | 100 | 341,200 | Passed |
| Trust records | 22 | 28,500 | Passed |
Your data
The school’s data belongs to the school.
We use it only to run SOS for you. You can take all of it, at any time, in a format any system can read.
Export everything
Every table as CSV with a data dictionary and checksums, made by the school whenever it chooses, at no extra cost.
Retention you agree
The school sets how long records are kept. SOS lists what has passed its period, and nothing is removed until someone confirms.
Subject access in one download
A pupil’s full record, from every table that mentions them, ready for a subject access request.
Erasure on request
A pupil or member of staff erased when the law requires it, with a record kept of what was done.
No comparisons without consent
A trust sees its own schools side by side. Nobody compares schools across trusts without written consent.
A clean exit
A complete export when you leave, the API open until your next supplier is accepted, then deletion with a certificate.
Integrations and the API
Open to the systems you choose.
SOS has a documented, versioned REST API. The school creates a token for each system it trusts, chooses what it can read, and revokes it whenever it likes.
- Per-client tokens, stored only as a hash, limited in rate and recorded in the audit log.
- Wonde for the apps schools connect through it, and DfE’s daily attendance collection.
- Realsmart and Google for sign-in, and Realsmart’s learning platform.
- DfE’s file formats: census XML for COLLECT, CTF and ATF, and ULN requests to the LRS.
In SOS
See who did what, and decide who can.
The audit log, each pupil’s history, roles and permissions, and sign-in without passwords.
Questions from your DPO
We are happy to go through the detail.
Send us your data protection or security questionnaire and we will answer it in full.