Data Security Overview

Data Centers

Heroku’s physical infrastructure is hosted and managed within Amazon’s secure data centers and utilize the Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology. Amazon continually manages risk and undergoes recurring assessments to ensure compliance with industry standards. Amazon’s data center operations have been accredited under:

• ISO 27001
• SOC 1 and SOC 2/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (Previously SAS 70 Type II)
• PCI Level 1
• FISMA Moderate
• Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
• PCI

Physical Security

Heroku utilizes ISO 27001 and FISMA certified data centers managed by Amazon. AWS data centers are housed in nondescript facilities, and critical facilities have extensive setback and military-grade perimeter control berms as well as other natural boundary protection. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state-of-the-art intrusion-detection systems, and other electronic means. Authorized staff must pass two-factor authentication no fewer than three times to access data center floors. All visitors and contractors are required to present identification and are signed in and continually escorted by authorized staff.

For additional information see: https://aws.amazon.com/security.

Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments

Third-party security testing of the Heroku application is performed by independent and reputable security consulting firms. Findings from each assessment are reviewed with the assessors, risk ranked, and assigned to the responsible team.

Environmental Safeguards

Fire Detection and Suppression

Automatic fire detection and suppression equipment has been installed to reduce risk. The fire detection system utilizes smoke detection sensors in all data center environments, mechanical and electrical infrastructure spaces, chiller rooms, and generator equipment rooms. These areas are protected by either wet-pipe, double-interlocked pre-action, or gaseous sprinkler systems.

Power

The data center electrical power systems are designed to be fully redundant and maintainable without impact to operations, 24 hours a day, and seven days a week. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units provide backup power in the event of an electrical failure for critical and essential loads in the facility.

Climate and Temperature Control

Climate control is required to maintain a constant operating temperature for servers and other hardware, which prevents overheating and reduces the possibility of service outages. Data centers are conditioned to maintain atmospheric conditions at optimal levels. Monitoring systems and data center personnel ensure temperature and humidity are at the appropriate levels.

Management

Data center staff monitor electrical, mechanical and life support systems and equipment so issues are immediately identified. Preventative maintenance is performed to maintain the continued operability of equipment.

For additional information see: https://aws.amazon.com/security.

Network Security

Firewalls

Firewalls are utilized to restrict access to systems from external networks and between systems internally. By default, all access is denied and only explicitly allowed ports and protocols are allowed based on business need. From a network perspective, security groups restrict access to only the ports and protocols required for a system’s specific function to mitigate risk.

Host-based firewalls restrict customer applications from establishing localhost connections over the loopback network interface to further isolate customer applications. Host-based firewalls also provide the ability to further limit inbound and outbound connections as needed.

Heroku System Security

System Configuration

System configuration and consistency is maintained through standard, up-to-date images, configuration management software, and by replacing systems with updated deployments. Systems are deployed using up-to-date images that are updated with configuration changes and security updates before deployment. Once deployed, existing systems are decommissioned and replaced with up-to-date systems.

Heroku Customer Application Isolation

Applications on the Heroku platform run within their own isolated environment and cannot interact with other applications or areas of the system to prevent security and stability issues. These self-contained environments isolate processes, memory, and the file system while host-based firewalls restrict applications from establishing local network connections. For additional technical information see: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-isolation.

Heroku System Authentication

Operating system access is limited to Heroku staff and requires username and key authentication. Operating systems do not allow password authentication to prevent password brute force attacks, theft, and sharing.

Heroku Vulnerability Management

The vulnerability management process is designed to remediate risks without customer interaction or impact. Heroku is notified of vulnerabilities through internal and external assessments, system patch monitoring, and third-party mailing lists and services. Each vulnerability is reviewed to determine if it is applicable to Heroku’s environment, ranked based on risk, and assigned to the appropriate team for resolution.

New systems are deployed with the latest updates, security fixes, and Heroku configurations and existing systems are decommissioned as customers are migrated to the new instances. This process allows Heroku to keep the environment up-to-date. Since customer applications run in isolated environments, they are unaffected by these core system updates.

Heroku Application Security

Heroku undergoes penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, and source code reviews to assess the security of our application, architecture and implementation. The third-party security assessments cover all areas of our platform, including testing for OWASP Top 10 web application vulnerabilities and customer application isolation. Heroku works closely with external security assessors to review the security of the Heroku platform and applications, and apply best practices.

Issues found in Heroku applications are risk ranked, prioritized, and assigned to the responsible team for remediation, and Heroku’s security team reviews each remediation plan to ensure proper resolution.

Heroku Backups

Customer Applications

Applications deployed to the Heroku platform are automatically backed up as part of the deployment process on secure, access controlled, and redundant storage. Heroku uses these backups to deploy our Prosci applications across our platform and to automatically bring applications back online in the event of an outage.

Customer Postgres Databases

Data is stored and managed in Heroku Postgres. Continuous Protection keeps data safe on Heroku Postgres. Every change to your data is written to write-ahead logs, which are shipped to multi-data center, high-durability storage. In the unlikely event of unrecoverable hardware failure, these logs can be automatically 'replayed' to recover the database to within seconds of its last known state. For additional technical information see: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups.

Heroku Platform Additional Information

From our instance images to our databases, each component is backed up to secure, access-controlled, and redundant storage. Our platform allows for recovering databases to within seconds of the last known state, restoring system instances from standard templates, and deploying customer applications and data. In addition to standard backup practices, Heroku’s infrastructure is designed to scale and be fault tolerant by automatically replacing failed instances and reducing the likelihood of needing to restore from backup.

Customer Applications and Databases

Our platform automatically restores customer applications and Heroku Postgres databases in the case of an outage. The Heroku platform is designed to dynamically deploy applications within the Heroku cloud, monitor for failures, and recover failed platform components including customer applications and databases.

Access to Customer Data

Heroku and our development team staff do not access or interact with customer data or applications as part of normal operations. There may be cases where Heroku or our developers are requested to interact with customer data or applications at the request of the customer for support purposes or where required by law. Customer data is access controlled and all access by Heroku staff is accompanied by customer approval or government mandate, reason for access, actions taken by staff, and support start and end time.

Prosci personnel only have access on a need-to-know, specifically granted-access basis. Prosci will not extract or use customer-specific data except where we have a legal basis to do so in order to fill the purpose for which the data was collected. Prosci will look at meta data so that we can understand which portions of the systems are being used so we can look at how to best meet client needs.

Encrypt Sensitive Data at Rest and in Transit

Customer data is encrypted both in transit via HTTPS / SSL and at rest in the database. Common data attributes such as passwords and two-factor authorization secrets are encrypted at rest and filtered out of data logs as part of the respective schemes used to implement those features.

Logging

Private Space Logging is a feature that enables us to configure log capture at the space level instead of the app level, thereby providing the ability to separate logs for specified client environments when a client-specific Private Shield environment is requested. For additional technical information see: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/logging.

Application Hierarchy

The Prosci hub-based solution set was built on the Heroku-20 Stack. The current support period from Heroku is through a minimum of April 2025.