Security practices, stated plainly

Five roles

Platform admin, organisation owner, programme admin, evaluator and applicant, each scoped to what that role needs to see.

Organisation isolation

Every organisation's data is isolated within a multi-tenant database; no organisation can query another's records.

Session lockout

Repeated failed sign-in attempts lock the account temporarily, to slow down credential-guessing.

Re-authentication for sensitive edits

Changes such as altering a submitted score or removing a user require the acting user to re-enter their password.

TLS in transit

All traffic between a browser and IdeaScore is encrypted with TLS.

Encrypted backups

Backups are encrypted at rest and taken daily, with a defined retention window before older backups are purged.

Audit log

Administrative actions — approvals, rejections, score changes, user and role changes — are recorded in an audit log.

Exportability

An organisation can export its programme data (submissions, scores, reports) rather than being locked in.

Input validation

Form submissions and file uploads are validated server-side, not only in the browser.

Rate limits

API and authentication endpoints are rate-limited to reduce abuse and automated attacks.

Dependency updates

Software dependencies are kept current to reduce exposure to known vulnerabilities.

Staging with sanitised data

Changes are tested on a staging environment using sanitised, non-production data before reaching customers.