Clerkswell

Managed service PaaS

Fully managed service for licencing, design, build, support of websites using Sitecore and Umbraco for web content management. Service includes project management, technical design and architecture, Azure cloud and Rackspace private cloud hosting with support, testing, training and reporting. ClerksWell are a gold Sitecore partner and a certified Umbraco partner.

Features

• Technical architecture & consultancy
• Full Azure or Rackspace cloud hosting
• Sitecore licence procurement
• Personalisation
• Open developer framework
• Agile & Waterfall GDS project management
• Responsive and adaptive website design & build
• Multi lingual websites
• Ongoing support & maintenance
• User training

Benefits

• Certified platform experts
• Customer centric approach and intensive customer support
• Established On-boarding framework
• Tier support levels
• Dedicated technical consultancy
• Enterprise cloud architects
• 99.5% up time
• Follow Government Digital Service (GDS) Standard
• Architectural guidance and code review
• Automatic scaling to cope with high traffic volumes

£650 to £1,000 a person a day

• Education pricing available

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at hello@clerkswell.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 12

Service ID

530076085740269

Contact

Megan Burberry
02076898800
hello@clerkswell.com

Service scope

• Service constraints: As a reseller and manager of the Umbraco and Sitecore cloud offering there are certain limitations to our offering in terms of guarantees we can provide. We are unable for example to make fundamental changes to the products. We can make modifications and build to your requirements in most cases but in some rare cases it will not be possible. When this happens we manage, prioritise and log change requests with Umbraco and Sitecore and the changes come in a later release or they advise us on a way around the issue.
• System requirements:
  • Correct licenses to match deployed Sitecore servers
  • Access to a MongoDB 2.6+ database server
  • A Windows Azure account

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Email or online ticketing
• Support response times: • Urgent items- Immediate; • High items- 2 hours; • Medium- 16 hours; • Low – agreed on a case by case basis; ; • Support will be available from 9am – 6pm, Monday to Friday (excluding any UK public or bank holidays).; • Support can be provided for out of hours’ deployments. These must be pre-arranged.; • Any request for services on a 24/7 basis can be provided with prior agreement on level of emergency and will be covered at a specific rate outside of this SLA.
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: Yes
• Online ticketing support accessibility: None or don’t know
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
• Web chat support: No
• Onsite support: Onsite support
• Support levels: Our support offering is very flexible and completely tailored to our customers’ requirements. We have clearly delineated support levels based on the priority rating of the issues (this is decided by the customer). ; Our support costs are dictated by the hours required and are based on our standard day rate. If 24/7, weekend support, or simply an extension of our standard 9-5 support hours we will arrange this based on the individual requirement of the customer.; ; • Support will be available from 9am – 6pm, Monday to Friday (excluding any UK public or bank holidays).; • Support can be provided for out of hours’ deployments. These must be pre-arranged.; • Any request for services on a 24/7 basis can be provided with prior agreement on level of emergency and will be covered at a specific rate outside of this SLA.; ; Every project has a project team composed of an Account Manager, Project Manager, Digital consultant, and Technical Lead.
• Support available to third parties: Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

• Getting started: We create peer-reviewed documentation during the project so it is available for the customer prior to them performing their User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Documents provided include:; ; • User Guide –a comprehensive guide targeted at Sitecore or Umbraco content editors and administrators. This is a guide to creating content on the website we have built specifically for the University. It presumes the content editors have some Sitecore or Umbraco experience or training, although a web literate person could learn from a standing start using the guide.; • Classroom exercises – content entry and Sitecore or Umbraco exercises to support classroom training sessions.; • Technical Specification – this is created at the start of the project and will be provided to the customer. It will also include documentation of interfaces/integrations with other systems, configurations and any other technical aspects that should be written down. ; ; We provide classroom and one-on-one training courses:; ; • Administrator training – targeted at super users/administrators and will cover administrative activities in Sitecore or Umbraco- such as user maintenance, housekeeping, security etc.; • Content editor training – targeted at anyone who will maintain content on the system. It will be supported by the “classroom exercises” document referred to above.
• Service documentation: Yes
• Documentation formats:
  • PDF
  • Other
• Other documentation formats: Microsoft Word
• End-of-contract data extraction: Everything which we build belongs to the user. We claim no ownership over the code or data.
• End-of-contract process: We require three months’ notice to change or end a contract.

Using the service

• Web browser interface: Yes
• Using the web interface: The Sitecore and Umbraco Web Content Management systems are both accessed through a web browser so as long as the customer has internet connection and the IP address has been whitelisted they will be able to add, edit and manage all content on their live website. They can also deploy marketing features such as automated marketing, personalisation and A/B testing.
• Web interface accessibility standard: None or don’t know
• How the web interface is accessible: Sitecore and Umbraco are not accessibility compliant for content editors and website administrators by default. Screen readers can be used.; We have made some alterations to make certain tasks accessibility compliant but this is not a requirement we have seen a lot. However, many of the websites we build are required to be WCAG 2.0 AA or EN 301 549 compliant for end users/website visitors. ; We make sure colours, fonts, video controls, images and captions are fully compliant and compatible with WCAG 2.0 AA.
• Web interface accessibility testing: We have not done any testing at this point.
• API: Yes
• What users can and can't do using the API: The Umbraco and Sitecore CMS systems have built-in APIs which allow external systems to access their content storage. These are generally used as a convenient way to allow external systems to have read access to website content, commonly for integrating with mobile apps or other external systems that need to present the same content. However, they can also be used to write or update content as well. These APIs are REST or SOAP based, and are fairly generic.; Both Umbraco and Sitecore allow you to build customised APIs using .Net code. This allows you to tailor an API to your specific business requirements. These can be built using any .Net technology for implementing APIs and can potentially expose any CMS feature to external systems.; If Microsoft Azure is used as the hosting platform for your website deployment, then this also exposes an API which can be used for infrastructure management. This is generally accessed via Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language, but REST endpoints are also available. Depending on your deployment strategy, this API can be used for anything from managing billing to deploying new servers and sites, as the entire Azure platform is scriptable.
• API automation tools:
  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • SaltStack
  • Terraform
  • Puppet
  • Other
• API documentation: Yes
• API documentation formats:
  • PDF
  • Other
• Command line interface: Yes
• Command line interface compatibility: Windows
• Using the command line interface: 3) For Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service deployments, the PowerShell and CLI tools can be used to manage all of the infrastructure resources that the Azure platform provides. (This CLI is not available for use with Umbraco’s Software-as-a-Service deployment model) It provides an authentication and authorisation layer to ensure that users can only manage accounts and resources that they are entitled to. It then provides a full list / create / update / delete model for each of the resource types Azure offers. This includes the underlying disk storage, network addresses, virtual machines, load balancers, databases, web applications and other features. A 3rd party extension for Sitecore is also available, which adds PowerShell-based scripting and a command-line UI. This can be used to manage content and users, import and export content and files, publish changes and adjust administrative settings.

Scaling

• Scaling available: Yes
• Scaling type:
  • Automatic
  • Manual
• Independence of resources: The Microsoft Azure infrastructure underlying the content management system handles resource balancing. Based on the particular types of virtual machine deployed and their internal algorithms for traffic routing and site isolation, the datacentre systems Azure provide ensure that sites remain independent.
• Usage notifications: Yes
• Usage reporting: Email

Analytics

• Infrastructure or application metrics: Yes
• Metrics types:
  • CPU
  • Disk
  • HTTP request and response status
  • Memory
  • Network
• Reporting types:
  • Regular reports
  • Reports on request

Resellers

• Supplier type: Reseller providing extra features and support
• Organisation whose services are being resold: Umbraco and Sitecore

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Staff screening not performed
• Government security clearance: Up to Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS)

Asset protection

• Knowledge of data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Data storage and processing locations:
  • United Kingdom
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
  • EU-US Privacy Shield agreement locations
  • Other locations
• User control over data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Datacentre security standards: Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
• Penetration testing frequency: At least once a year
• Penetration testing approach: ‘IT Health Check’ performed by a CHECK service provider
• Protecting data at rest:
  • Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
  • Encryption of all physical media
• Data sanitisation process: Yes
• Data sanitisation type:
  • Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
  • Hardware containing data is completely destroyed
• Equipment disposal approach: Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Backup and recovery

• Backup and recovery: Yes
• What’s backed up:
  • All aspects of the system can be backed up.
  • Code and content deployed to Sitecore or Umbraco
  • Databases, virtual machines and file storage
• Backup controls: We agree this with our client depending on their requirements.; Any backups which are performed via the content management UI can be done by editorial users whenever they wish. Infrastructure level backups will be configured to run automatically, to strike a sensible balance between the costs of storage and maintenance they incur, and the client’s requirements for disaster recovery and support budgets.
• Datacentre setup: Multiple datacentres with disaster recovery
• Scheduling backups: Users schedule backups through a web interface
• Backup recovery:
  • Users can recover backups themselves, for example through a web interface
  • Users contact the support team

Data-in-transit protection

• Data protection between buyer and supplier networks:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
  • Legacy SSL and TLS (under version 1.2)
• Data protection within supplier network:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • Legacy SSL and TLS (under version 1.2)

Availability and resilience

• Guaranteed availability: Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure provides at least 99.9% guarantees for the infrastructure and services it provides. The uptime guarantees are managed automatically by the Azure infrastructure. It provides automatic replication (and optionally geo-replication) of all stored data to prevent downtime from hardware failures, and the infrastructure fabric can silently switch between locations for data if issues are detected.; Services deployed using PaaS techniques can be configured to automatically swap in and out instances which are not behaving optimally. This allows a guarantee of 99.95% for availability.; Deployment via IaaS techniques, where the service is deployed into multiple “availability groups” is guaranteed to have 99.95% uptime for virtual machines.; For some Azure services, clients can opt to pay for a higher availability tier if they wish. This is commonly 99.95% but may vary depending on the services in question.; Any deployment built on top of Azure (IaaS, PaaS for Sitecore or UaaS) takes advantage of these features. However these guarantees apply to the underlying infrastructure only – the software running on top of the infrastructure (ie Sitecore or Umbraco) is not directly guaranteed by Microsoft .
• Approach to resilience: Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure has been built specifically with resilience in mind. The “Azure Fabric” services which manage the system have a variety of features built in which work to ensure that the services provided by Azure are as resilient as possible.; ; All data in Azure’s storage layer is replicated in triplicate in a data centre. This ensures that the loss of individual drives or racks does not cause the loss of data. When a deployment is configured, it is also possible to add geo-replication of data. This ensures that all data is kept in triplicate in a second physical data centre as well.; ; When infrastructure such as virtual machines is deployed, they can be configured in “availability groups” where multiple VMs serve the same site. This allows the failure of one machine to be covered by the remaining machines until errors are addressed.; ; With platform-as-a-service deployments, the individual “workers” in a deployment are effectively disposable. The infrastructure underlying the service is able to create and destroy them as necessary. This means that if a hardware or software failure causes some to stop working correctly they can be replaced from Azure’s pool of free resources automatically and quickly.
• Outage reporting: Any outages are reported via a public dashboard.

Identity and authentication

• User authentication:
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password
• Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels: The Azure infrastructure, and deployments of Sitecore and Umbraco on top of it, support role-based security. Administrators can define in granular terms which features and resources a particular authenticated user is allowed access too. Groups can be defined to standardise the application of collections of roles if required.; For Azure the roles control all aspects of the management process – what functions can be performed and what resources can be accessed for a particular subscription.; Umbraco and Sitecore provide security in their content management UIs, which can restrict users to particular regions of content or particular management functions.
• Access restriction testing frequency: Never
• Management access authentication:
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password
• Devices users manage the service through:
  • Any device but through a bastion host (a bastion host is a server that provides access to a private network from an external network such as the internet)
  • Directly from any device which may also be used for normal business (for example web browsing or viewing external email)

Audit information for users

• Access to user activity audit information: Users contact the support team to get audit information
• How long user audit data is stored for: User-defined
• Access to supplier activity audit information: Users contact the support team to get audit information
• How long supplier audit data is stored for: User-defined
• How long system logs are stored for: User-defined

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: Yes
• Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001: Microsoft's third-party accreditiation body
• ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date: Accreditation is done annually
• What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover: The Azure infrastructure used for deployments is covered by this accreditation, but details of any aspects not covered are not available.
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: Yes
• CSA STAR accreditation date: October 2016
• CSA STAR certification level: Level 3: CSA STAR Certification
• What the CSA STAR doesn’t cover: Azure is covered by the certification. Anything out side of Azure is not covered.
• PCI certification: No
• Other security certifications: Yes
• Any other security certifications: Cyber Essentials Certificate

Security governance

• Named board-level person responsible for service security: No
• Security governance certified: Yes
• Security governance standards: CSA CCM version 3.0
• Information security policies and processes: Owners are designated for all critical components. These systems and assets are fully documented and have defined security requirements around change management. These include an audit trail and a reporting structure through each business unit to the board where risks are discussed before any production changes. Employees are held accountable to breaches of these agreed procedures.

Operational security

• Configuration and change management standard: Supplier-defined controls
• Configuration and change management approach: All code in development is held securely within a version controlled source control system (Visual Studio Team Services). All code goes through an internal review process before being released to a quality assurance environment. Once there is it subjected to further review and security testing before release to the production environment.
• Vulnerability management type: Supplier-defined controls
• Vulnerability management approach: The product is built on the Microsoft and Azure platforms and ClerksWell actively monitors official and unofficial channels for threats to those platforms and the protocols around them. When a threat is assessed that impacts the website, patches can be deployed as soon as a mitigation is available.
• Protective monitoring type: Undisclosed
• Protective monitoring approach: Potential compromises would be detected via the built-in monitoring technology for the systems involved. Unexpected increases in load on servers, unexpected errors in log files, unexpected audit data or files on disk and site performance decreases are all indications that we would follow-up on. In all cases our response will be a detailed examination, to determine the cause, ensure we understand what follow-up is required and report back to the client. Response times will follow our agreed SLA with the client.
• Incident management type: Undisclosed
• Incident management approach: Defined processes exist for responses to outages and compromises (real or suspected). These processes are rehearsed on a regular basis. Users report incidents via a helpdesk or direct communication with a named customer services representative depending on the severity of the problem. Customer incident reports are provided via the helpdesk.

Secure development

• Approach to secure software development best practice: Supplier-defined process

Separation between users

• Virtualisation technology used to keep applications and users sharing the same infrastructure apart: Yes
• Who implements virtualisation: Supplier
• Virtualisation technologies used: VMware
• How shared infrastructure is kept separate: The Azure Fabric services ensure separation between tenants on their infrastructure. It uses a variety of technologies:; ; • Authentication and role-based security is required for all access to the management portal its APIs and the Azure resources you own.; ; • Data encryption keys are specific to individual Azure accounts.; ; • Networking Virtual prevents network traffic from one account reaching resources in another.; ; • Hardware Virtualisation security prevents resources running on a server from interacting.

Energy efficiency

• Energy-efficient datacentres: Yes
• Description of energy efficient datacentres: Customers may request or provide a list of Code of Conduct Practices implemented in the relevant data centre to assist in procurement of services that meet their environmental or sustainability standards.

Pricing

• Price: £650 to £1,000 a person a day
• Discount for educational organisations: Yes
• Free trial available: No

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at hello@clerkswell.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.