Security

HR Konnect stores some of the most sensitive information a business holds — employee records, leave and medical documentation, pay-related data, and identity documents. We treat protecting that information as a core part of the product, not an afterthought. This page describes the controls we have in place. For how we collect and handle personal information, see our Privacy Policy.

1. Australian data residency

Your data stays in Australia. Our primary database runs on Neon PostgreSQL in Sydney (AWS ap-southeast-2), and the application is hosted on Vercel’s Sydney (syd1) region. HR documents and file attachments are stored in Cloudflare R2 configured to the Oceania (OC) — Australia & Pacific jurisdiction. We take reasonable steps to ensure personal information is not stored outside Australia. The only routine cross-border transfer is transactional email delivery (see our Privacy Policy, Section 5), which carries no bulk HR data.

2. Encryption

• All data is encrypted in transit using TLS. HTTP is upgraded to HTTPS and HSTS is enforced.
• All data is encrypted at rest — both the database and file storage encrypt stored data by default.
• Authentication sessions are signed; the session cookie holds only a signed identifier, never personal information.

3. Multi-tenancy & access control

HR Konnect is a multi-tenant platform, and keeping one organisation’s data invisible to every other organisation is a first-class design constraint:

• Every record is scoped to its organisation. Each request resolves the organisation from the authenticated session on the server — never from anything the browser can set — and every data query is filtered by that organisation.
• Role-based access control across four levels — Employee, Manager, HR, and Organisation Admin — plus specialised Payroll Officer and Auditor roles. Permissions are enforced on the server for every action, not just hidden in the interface.
• Employees can only see their own records; managers are scoped to their direct reports.

4. Audit logging

Every change to HR data emits an audit event recording who did what, when, and to which record. Audit entries are hash-chained — each links cryptographically to the one before it — so the log is tamper-evident and can be independently verified. Organisations with the Auditor role get read-only access to this trail.

5. Application hardening

• HTTP security headers on every response: HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, and a Content Security Policy.
• Rate limiting on the API, with tighter limits on authentication, invitation, and onboarding endpoints to resist brute-force and abuse.
• All input is validated at the API boundary before use, and database queries are parameterised — never assembled from raw user input.
• Error responses are sanitised so they never leak stack traces, internal identifiers, or schema details.
• Server-side error monitoring alerts our team to issues, typically before customers notice them.

6. Backups & recovery

The database supports point-in-time recovery with a 7-day retention window, so we can restore to any moment within the last week if needed. The production database branch is protected against accidental deletion or reset. File storage is independently durable and versioned by the storage provider.

7. Reliability & change management

• Changes pass an automated gate — type checking, linting, an audited dependency-vulnerability scan, and an automated test suite — before they can ship.
• Database changes are applied through a tracked, reviewed migration process with a drift check run before production releases.
• Post-deployment health and smoke checks verify the live service after every release.

8. Your data is yours

Employees can export a copy of their own personal data at any time from the Employee Self-Service portal, and can request erasure of their record. Organisation administrators can export their organisation’s HR data. See our Privacy Policy (Sections 6 & 7) for data retention and portability, including the record-keeping obligations we must observe under the Fair Work Act 2009.

9. Data breach response

HR Konnect is subject to the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme under Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). In the event of an eligible breach — one likely to result in serious harm — we will notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and affected individuals as soon as practicable, and take immediate steps to contain and remediate. We maintain an internal incident-response process.

10. Reporting a vulnerability

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in HR Konnect, we want to hear from you. Please email security@hrkonnect.com.au with details and steps to reproduce. We ask that you give us a reasonable opportunity to investigate and remediate before any public disclosure, and that testing does not disrupt our service or access data that is not your own.