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Our Security Culture

Since our foundation in 1998, we have placed security at the very core of our business. We have a strong security culture and have provided our customers with trusted telecommunications and data services for over a decade.

All our key staff members hold British Government National Security Vetting clearances and Metropolitan Police Non-Police Personnel Vetting certificates.

Our systems are hardened in accordance with industry best practice, monitored by an intrusion detection system and replicated at multiple secure data centres over private layer-2 links.

All our services are delivered over secure and fully encrypted channels. These include our aql.com web portal and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Secure and encrypted protocols are used to protect the confidentiality of our customers' data before it traverses any public or private networks.

Our network is designed to be fault-tolerant and is load-balanced in a high-availability configuration. Underpinning the reliability of our network service lies a resilient, multi-site presence both inside and outside of London. Each site has multiple connections to various mobile network service and transit providers, and a resilient ring connecting each of our points-of-presence.

We monitor 600,000 quality and security related metrics every day, including hardware, network and application layer attributes, to ensure systems are performing correctly and to defined standards. During the snow falls in January 2010, our peak SMS sending rate comfortably exceeded over 500,000 messages per hour.

We use multiple-vendor resilient edge-routers on all our sites, operating industry standard fail-over protocols, allowing resilient peering to be achieved with our customers.

Connections to mobile network service providers are made from least two of our points-of-presence, providing a high-level of availability. In addition, our primary, secondary and tertiary sites are resilient for network connectivity, power, and cooling. We also operate resilient diesel power back-up generators.

We're so confident of the service we provide that we are able to offer a 100% availability SLA to all our customers connecting to three or more of our points-of-presence.

We are classed as an Ofcom Provider of Electronic Communications Networks (PECN). We are also members of Nominet, RIPE, LINX, the Internet Telephony Services Providers’ Association (ITSPA) and the London-based Internet Exchange Point (LONAP). We actively adhere to Ofcom regulation and PhonePayPlus guidelines.

We are a member of the Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme (CISAS) and employ an in-house legal and regulatory affairs lawyer, in order to ensure compliance with all legislation, including that pertaining to telecommunications.

We operate quality assurance systems in-line with ISO27001 and employ ITIL best practice methodology in all IT project management. We operate at a level of compliance in-line with ISO9000 for quality processes, including the application and adherence to TickIT Guidelines for Software Development.

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