As most of you will no doubt know, it is essential to host personal data on a secure (https) certified web site, as opposed to a standard http site.

This is mandated in the UK by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It’s also important not to just pay lip service to security concerns. Over the past few months, we have applied about a dozen security patches to the various software packages that provide our services.  Unfortunately this usually requires restarting our servers for the updates to take effect. So we had to do this again this week.

Our servers were down for about one minute between 3pm and 4pm on Saturday whist this rebooting took place (25^th Oct 2014).

Our apology if this has caused any inconvenience. Unfortunately these reboots seem to be required more regularly in our efforts to keep the bad boys out.

Data protection in the UK: Information Commisioner's Office