To increase the security of the information that clients entrust to us, to expand the professional services we offer, and to improve the quality of those services, we outsource selected processes to third-party vendors. The following summarizes our current outsourcing practices as of November 7th, 2014:
To Improve Data Security
We use offsite online backup data centers supplied by Carbonite. The Carbonite backup system provides for secure offsite storage at highly secure data centers with sophisticated access control systems, around the clock security guards, and emergency backup generators with guaranteed fuel contracts. The Carbonite backup process, by the way, actually encrypts our transmissions using 128-bit Blowfish encryption before transmission, and the transmission of course uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
To Allow for the Convenience of E-Filing
We must electronically send taxpayer information through the Lacerte Electronic Filing Center in order to transmit client data to the Internal Revenue Service. As you would expect from the tax software industry’s leader, Lacerte uses 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (“SSL”) certificates to encrypt the data that moves between our computers and the e-filing service’s servers.
To Improve Quality of Service
We encourage clients to deliver data to us using the ShareFile portal product. (ShareFile is a Citrix company.) A leading portal product for public accounting and law firms, ShareFile uses SSAE 16 audited datacenters and up to AES 256-bit encryption.