Q-Solution Ltd

Secure Mail as a Service

The service is a public cloud based service, providing the necessary encryption, malware, infrastructure and security monitoring standards and providing connectivity to customers on the internet and secure Public Sector Network (PSN).

Features

  • Connectivity for Internet and Public Services Network mail servers
  • 24/7 support desk
  • Leveraging public cloud services, providing resilience and capacity at scale
  • Fully Managed Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM)
  • Supports all industry standard Authentication mechanisms - DKIM, SPF, DMARC
  • Data held entirely within UK Sovereign Data Centres
  • Highly scalable anti malware service
  • All messages encrypted aligned to FIPS 140-2
  • Certified against Cyber Essentials Plus and SIO27001:2013
  • 99.9% availability

Benefits

  • Pay-per-mail thus greatly reducing the costs of ‘dormant’ users
  • Increased reliability and availability utilising AWS core mail services
  • Secure email delivery from internet to PSN connected services
  • Public Cloud solution
  • Implementing in-transit and at rest malware scanning
  • Emails with up to 40MB attachments can be sent reliably

Pricing

£0.01 to £0.03 a transaction

Service documents

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 kevin.hoskins@q-solution.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 13

Service ID

6 3 3 1 8 0 8 3 9 8 1 2 2 8 0

Contact

Q-Solution Ltd Kevin Hoskins
Telephone: 07966 306058
Email: kevin.hoskins@q-solution.co.uk

Service scope

Software add-on or extension
No
Cloud deployment model
Public cloud
Service constraints
The following are the current limitations of the service. We do however encourage customers to review these pages and the dashboard for changes made to the service as we aim to continually improve the capacity, availability and overall service provision.

Individual message sizes can be up to 40MB via either webmail or SMTP
System requirements
  • Compliant Mail Client
  • Compliant Mail Server (RFC5321 and RFC5322)

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
4 hours, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm excluding UK Public Holidays
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
Yes
Online ticketing support accessibility
None or don’t know
Phone support
No
Web chat support
No
Onsite support
Yes, at extra cost
Support levels
Support hours for the service desk is between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Friday excluding UK Public Holidays. Our Protective Monitoring and System Monitoring however operates 24/7/365 and will generate alerts throughout this period in the event of any priority incidents occurring.

The service availability outside of core hours allows for patches, change requests and enhancements to be made to the service. A scheduled maintenance window will operate with notification of changes published to the Service Desk Portal as well as communicated via the customers preferred channel.

By design, the services provides the necessary resilience to allow patching to occur without service interruption
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
We have a detailed onboarding process that supports users and that can be provided upon request. The process details how users a provisioned onto the service and details the levels of support Q-Solution provides.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
PDF
End-of-contract data extraction
This will be detailed in the On Boarding and Off boarding process documents provided to the customer and will align to the latest Data Protection Standards
End-of-contract process
Details of any additional costs will be provided in the Off Boarding procedures. However, as a SaaS service, there would typically not be expected any additional costs for Off Boarding

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Supported browsers
  • Internet Explorer 11
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari
Application to install
No
Designed for use on mobile devices
No
Service interface
Yes
User support accessibility
None or don’t know
Description of service interface
Users interface with the service through a portal in order to raise tickets. The technical service interface is via the SMTP protocol and APIs
Accessibility standards
WCAG 2.1 AA or EN 301 549
Accessibility testing
Users of the system interface at a human level through JIRA Service Desk. This is a SaaS product delivered by Atlassian where details of accessibility can be found on their website
API
No
Customisation available
No

Scaling

Independence of resources
Our design maximises the use of all UK Hyperscale AWS Availabilities Zones to ensure any increases or spikes in capacity have no detrimental impact on the services or customers. The service is monitored 24/7 with alerting to Q-Solution and customer service desks as required.

Analytics

Service usage metrics
Yes
Metrics types
Realtime cost analysis, Message Volumes, Total registered users and Geolocation information
Reporting types
Real-time dashboards

Resellers

Supplier type
Not a reseller

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Conforms to BS7858:2019
Government security clearance
Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Asset protection

Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
Yes
Data storage and processing locations
United Kingdom
User control over data storage and processing locations
No
Datacentre security standards
Managed by a third party
Penetration testing frequency
At least once a year
Penetration testing approach
‘IT Health Check’ performed by a CHECK service provider
Protecting data at rest
Other
Other data at rest protection approach
We have a detailed Access Control Policy as well as Malware and Encryption policy, subjected to annual security review that details our approach to securing customers data at rest. These can be provided to the customer upon request
Data sanitisation process
Yes
Data sanitisation type
  • Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
  • Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
Equipment disposal approach
A third-party destruction service

Data importing and exporting

Data export approach
Data held on the Secure Email Service is considered OFFICIAL SENSITIVE. Q-Solution will support any requirements to export data as part of the On Boarding Process
Data export formats
CSV
Data import formats
CSV

Data-in-transit protection

Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
  • Private network or public sector network
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
Data protection within supplier network
TLS (version 1.2 or above)

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
Service levels for availability during core hours are 99.9%. Outside of core hours, availability is 99.5%. Further details of SLAs and KPI's are provided during the On Boarding process
Approach to resilience
The service is designed and built to be entirely cloud native and serverless. Detailed information on the design for resilience of the solution can be provided during the On Boarding process and subject to confidentiality provisions
Outage reporting
Email alerts and real time customer facing dashboards

Identity and authentication

User authentication needed
Yes
User authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Username or password
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
Only support staff with SC clearance have access. Access is restricted to individuals accredited machines. Support staff required password and hardware token MFA. Account activity is protectively monitored and alerted. We have implemented Azure AD Single Sign On for all our services.
Access restriction testing frequency
At least every 6 months
Management access authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Identity federation with existing provider (for example Google Apps)
  • Limited access network (for example PSN)
  • Username or password

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
At least 12 months

Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
Yes
Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
BSI
ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
08/02/2022
What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
Please refer to the formal BSI Certificate of Registration and our Statement of Applicability available on request
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
No
Cyber essentials
Yes
Cyber essentials plus
Yes
Other security certifications
Yes
Any other security certifications
  • Annual Check Approved ITHC
  • PSN Protected Code Of Connection

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
Yes
Security governance standards
ISO/IEC 27001
Information security policies and processes
Our Security Working Group oversees the implementation, maintenance and improvement of our ISO27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISMS). This ISMS encompasses numerous process, policies and procedures including Information Security Policy, Acceptable Usage Policy, Statement of Applicability (SOA), Risk Assessment, Secure Development Policy, MMAE Policy, Business Continuity Policy and Plan and Change and Configuration Management among many others.
Additionally we have an independent IT Health Check (ITHC) performed by a CHECK Team annually and are certified to Cyber Essentials Plus (CES+)

Operational security

Configuration and change management standard
Supplier-defined controls
Configuration and change management approach
A comprehensive Change Management process is provided to the customer during the on-boarding processes. This can also be shared with any potential customer during their supplier identification process
Vulnerability management type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Vulnerability management approach
We have a separately documented vulnerability management process that can be shared with customers upon request covering areas such as Monitoring, Threat Detection, Security Alerting, Compliance, Audit Logging, SIEM, Patch Management and anti malware
Protective monitoring type
Supplier-defined controls
Protective monitoring approach
We have a separately documented Protective Monitoring process that can be shared with customers upon request covering areas such as Monitoring, Threat Detection, Security Alerting, Compliance, Audit Logging and SIEM
Incident management type
Supplier-defined controls
Incident management approach
We have a comprehensive documented approach to both Incident and Problem Management. This information, in the form of PDF can be provided to customers on request

Secure development

Approach to secure software development best practice
Supplier-defined process

Public sector networks

Connection to public sector networks
Yes
Connected networks
Public Services Network (PSN)

Social Value

Equal opportunity

Equal opportunity

We have a Board approved Equal Opportunities and Diversity Policy
Wellbeing

Wellbeing

We have both a Health and Safety Policy and Harassment and Bullying Policy

Pricing

Price
£0.01 to £0.03 a transaction
Discount for educational organisations
No
Free trial available
No

Service documents

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 kevin.hoskins@q-solution.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.