SMS FTP - General Information

General Information

All of our server instances, file storage, and database hosting are provided by Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com.
Amazon Web Services has achieved ISO 27001 certification and has successfully completed multiple SAS70 Type II audits.
Amazon has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale datacenters. This experience has been applied to the Amazon platform and infrastructure.

SMS stores all files uploaded by customers in the Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service. Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.
Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy.
Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If corruption is detected, it is repaired using redundant data.
SMS saves backups of files that are deleted and retain such backups for a period of time that is customizable by you. Our support staff is able to restore deleted files directly back to your account.
All files are stored by default in the US Standard Region of Amazon S3, which means that they are exclusively stored within the United States. Customers may request to have files stored in other S3 regions by contacting us.
Files are encrypted-at-rest within Amazon S3, with all encryption keys stored in a key-management escrow service operated by Amazon S3. (** Applies to all files uploaded after October 5, 2011.)

Our front-end HTTP and FTP servers are server instances powered by the Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. Within Amazon EC2, we maintain at least two separate client-facing HTTP/FTP front-end server instances, each in a separate EC2 Availability Zone.
Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, applications are prevented from failure of a single location.
These server instances are all monitored every minute on ports 80, 443, 21, 22, and 990 to ensure uptime. Whenever any instance goes down, our FTP partner's server administrators are immediately paged.
Our FTP Partner ships pertinent information from system and event logs to separate servers that store our system logs and alert us to any unusual activity.
While our FTP Partner ordinarily operate from the Amazon EC2 US-East Region (Northern Virgina), we have procedures in place that would allow us to migrate our entire service to the Amazon EC2 US-West Region (Northern California) in the event of a major disruption to US-East.

SMS uses Amazon Relational Database Service, a managed database hosting service to host our FTP Partner's databases. Amazon RDS ensures that our databases are always patched with the latest updates.
Using the "Multi-AZ" capability of Amazon RDS to ensure that a hot-backup standby database server is always running and available in a separate Availability Zone.
Point-in-time Restore capabilities on our FTP Partner's database servers for any time in the last 7 days. This means that we can restore our database to its state at any given time in the past 7 days (such as immediately before a service disruption).
Additionally, full database snapshots are taken and stored in Amazon S3 every 24 hours. These snapshots are retained for at least 7 days.

Our servers are configured to page and E-Mail our system administrators any time any unexpected event (called an "Exception") occurs in our web application software.
Our FTP Partner's engineers respond as quickly as possible to any error states.
Exception reports are retained for at least thirty days.