YourMembership Technology
Ensuring your success.
As the leading SaaS-based association management software in the industry, YourMembership is built on a foundation to ensure our customers’ success. Our cloud features and security measures are of the highest quality and constantly enhanced to deliver world-class stability and confidence.
Infrastructure
YourMembership (YM) hosts its application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualized Infrastructure-as-a-Service (lasS) offering. AWS provides a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure platform, which powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries .
AWS is divided into geographic Regions, which are physical data centers. These are known as EC2 Regions and are designed to be completely isolated from the others. The EC2 locations are called Availability Zones. The AWS Cloud operates dozens of Availability Zones within 16 geographic Regions worldwide.
Currently, YM runs in at least three Availability Zones and utilizes additional Availability Zones when necessary (with the ability to scale up to seven). All backups are delivered to separate Regions, and the disaster recovery site is in a separate AWS Region.
The YM application is maintained on a self-healing infrastructure, which can automatically respond to higher workloads and adjust to scale up and down, as necessary. All the servers, network, firewalls, etc., are maintained as Infrastructure-as-Code (laC), which allows quick fixes and updates, as well as quicker deployments, with less chance of human error.
Application Architecture & Redundancies
AWS is divided into geographic Regions, which are physical data centers. These are known as EC2 Regions and are designed to be completely isolated from the others. The EC2 locations are called Availability Zones. The AWS Cloud operates dozens of Availability Zones within 16 geographic Regions worldwide.
The physical servers have redundant disk subsystems, networking and power. The servers run in clusters to handle spikes in usage and provide fault tolerance should an individual node encounter a localized complete system failure. The web clusters are load balanced so web requests are processed using the most optimal nodes at any given time.
Database servers operate as clusters, which allow for pushing the load to a standby server should a primary server encounter a localized system failure. Data is replicated to secondary nodes within minutes of transactions being committed on the primary node. These transactions are also securely replicated to YourMembership’s secondary facility.
The DNS is hosted in multiple geographic locations, including a presence in Europe. YourMembership’s DNS employs anycast addressing, which routes DNS requests to the closest geographic location.
Headquarters & Backup NOC Overview
Designed with redundancies in place to ensure maximum uptime and accessibility, our corporate headquarters serves as our backup Network Operations Center. The NOC within our headquarters served as our primary data center facility for 12 years (1998-2010) with a historic uptime of more than 99.95%.
OC48 fiber connectivity
Cisco routing, firewalls and intrusion detection systems
Liebert climate control with redundancy
Line conditioning powered by high-end APC units
Actively-monitored security with 24×7 card-key access, video and audio monitoring
System Security
Member data is secure and inaccessible to non-members, unless otherwise specified by the administrator or members themselves (example: Contact data for public-facing directories). All members must maintain a username and password for community access. Initial member registration approval can occur one of two ways. First, members can register and be manually approved via an administrative approval process. Second, administrators may opt to bulk import non-member and/or member records and included data relevant to the configuration of the target record type.
Administrative backend accounts require a username and password, and can only be managed by an administrator with account creation rights. Administrators with the right to create accounts may create as many accounts as needed, each with different administrative accessibility (i.e. member profile management, donation management, store order management, mass emailing capability, etc.).
Passwords are not stored in the database. New and changed passwords are “hashed” using industry-standard encryption techniques. Only hashed versions of passwords are stored. They cannot be decrypted.
Security measures are implemented at multiple layers and designed to protect against DDoS, XSS and SQL Injection type attacks, and has explicit policies to block unwanted traffic from within or outside the network.
Data Backup, Replication & Restore
Customer data is stored on a server configured with redundant storage, allowing for no service interruption in the event of a single disk failure. Customer data is backed up daily to the AWS Simple Storage System (s3). YM monitors the infrastructure of all customer sites 24/7.
