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How we look after what you put in
Adhera holds the record of how your controls run and the evidence that proves it. This page says, plainly, what we do to protect that, and what we don't yet do.
Where we are. Adhera is pre-release, in use by a small group of design partners. The controls below are the ones in place today. We would rather you read an honest page now than a glossy one later. If something you need isn't covered, ask: security@adheraworks.com.
1. Hosting and encryption
- Adhera runs on Google Cloud in the United States, in a single region, on managed services rather than servers we patch ourselves.
- Every connection to Adhera and to this site uses HTTPS. Plain HTTP is redirected, and browsers are told to stay on HTTPS.
- The database is a managed PostgreSQL service with encryption at rest handled by Google Cloud, reached only from the application over Google's private connector, not from the internet.
- Application secrets, such as database credentials and API keys, live in Google Secret Manager and are injected at runtime. They are not in the code, the container image, or the repository.
2. Keeping organizations apart
Every record in Adhera belongs to one organization, and every query the application makes is scoped to the organization of the person signed in. That scoping is applied in the server, not trusted from the browser. A request that names a record belonging to another organization is answered as if the record did not exist.
Demo workspaces are separate organizations built from invented data, deleted when the visitor signs out or after a day idle. Nothing in a demo can reach a customer's records.
3. Who can see what
- Your people. You invite them and choose a role. Contributors see the work assigned to them and nothing of the program around it. Owners and admins see the program.
- Auditors. You invite them with a scope: which compliance areas, and which entities. They see what is in scope and nothing outside it. Their actions, and the actions refused to them, are in the audit trail.
- Us. Adhera staff can reach production only through named accounts, and only when needed to run the service or help you. That access is logged.
- Sign-in. Passwords are stored as salted bcrypt hashes. Sessions expire after twelve hours. Sign-in attempts are rate-limited per address and per account, so a password cannot be guessed at speed.
4. The audit trail
Adhera is compliance software, so its own record-keeping is part of the product. The trail records who did what and when: uploads, reviews, status changes, exports, changes to requests, and access that was refused. The trail is scoped to your organization, visible to your administrators and, where you allow, your auditors, and it is kept with your data for as long as your data is kept. It is not editable from the product.
5. AI processing
Adhera uses Google's Gemini models for specific jobs: writing up a described procedure as a control, reading a screen recording into task steps, checking an evidence file against its task, drafting instructions, reading audit request lists and vendors' SOC reports, guiding control tests, and answering questions in the assistant. For each job, only the content that job needs is sent. We use the Gemini API under its paid service terms, which do not allow Google to use the content to train or improve its models. Model output is advisory: a person can override any result, and the trail records both the model's verdict and the person's decision. Screen recordings used to draft task steps are sent to the model. The person recording is told so before they start, and Adhera keeps the video only if they choose to. Video, archives and slide decks uploaded as evidence are not sent to a model; a person reviews them.
6. Service providers
We rely on a small number of providers, each under a contract that limits what they may do with the information.
| Provider | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | Hosting the product, its database, and uploaded files | United States |
| Google (Gemini API) | AI processing described above | United States and other locations where Google operates |
| Cloudflare | Serving this website, DNS, and the emails this site's forms send | Global network; United States |
| Google Workspace | Our company email | United States |
We will tell customers before adding a provider that would handle their data.
7. Retention and deletion
Your data stays for as long as your account is active. When a pilot or subscription ends, you can export it, and we delete it within 30 days of the end date, or sooner if you ask, with backups overwritten within a further 30 days. The full detail is in the privacy notice.
8. How we run it
- Changes go through version control and a pull request, and are deployed by an automated pipeline that builds the schema from scratch before it will deploy. Nothing is edited on a running server.
- Checks. The product carries a suite of verification scripts, run before changes are merged, covering scoping between organizations, auditor scope, request handling, the audit trail, and the demo's isolation.
- Incidents. If we learn of a breach that affects your information, we will tell you without undue delay, say what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing about it.
- Backups. The database is backed up automatically by the managed service, with point-in-time recovery.
9. Reporting a security problem
If you believe you have found a vulnerability in Adhera or this site, please tell us at security@adheraworks.com before telling anyone else. Include enough detail for us to reproduce it. We will acknowledge within two business days, keep you informed, and credit you if you wish once it is fixed.
We will not take action against research done in good faith that respects the following: do not access, change or delete data that is not yours, do not degrade the service for others, and do not test with a real customer's organization. The demo workspace, which uses invented data, is the right place to look.