Privacy Statement

The data we gather

When using our website or make an enquiry via another route such as email or a ‘phone call, you may choose to share the following information with us:

• Your first and last name, job title and current company
• Contact information including your preferred email for communication (typically your corporate email address) and a contact phone number (we request a business contact number)
• Project related information
• Any additional comments that you may have relating to a product enquiry or a blog article.
• If you accept our web cookie policy, we will also collect website usage data with the goal of improving our website, your user experience and making sure our marketing material is relevant to you. You can read more about our use of cookies below.

IMPORTANT: The personal information we collect does not typically exceed what would appear on your company business card. We do not collect or store any high-risk personal data (e.g. credit card details or passwords) or sensitive personal data.

Furthermore, we are the sole owners of any information collected. We will not sell or rent this information to anyone.

Legitimate interests for processing your data

In accordance with the GDPR set to go into effect on May 25th, there may be circumstances where we need to keep your contact details (and remain in contact). Specifically, these circumstances are:

• Where our customer account team and/or support desk need to maintain contact in order to provide technical support, upgrade information and product alerts
• Where our contracts team needs to administrate support, service and subscription renewals.
• Where our sales and consulting teams need to liaise with you in relation to a current project or solution enquiry.

 

These are what we consider to be our ‘Legitimate Interests’ and enable us to provide the best service to you and the company you represent. We also make sure we carefully consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights before we process your data for our legitimate interests.

See below for more information on how business contact data is collected and protected.

How data is collected

• Contact forms – When you request information about a certain solution, service or product on our website, we use Active Campaign forms to collect this information.
• Emails – Any email links on our website simply launch your local email client and your email is sent directly from your email platform to our Exchange server.
• Newsletter Subscription – If you subscribe to our Cloud Essentials newsletter, we will collect your business email address into Active Campaign.
• Blog comments – Should you choose to add a comment to any posts that we have published on our Cloud Essentials blog, you have the option to log in via your social network using Disqus, in which case your information may appear next to your comment.
• Website usage data – We use cookies to collect statistics about your visit, like which of our pages you viewed.

For more information on each of these areas see below.

How we use your data

The personal information we collect is used expressly for:

• Keeping you updated: Where you’ve given us permission, we will send occasional marketing emails featuring technical insights and event invitations relating to the solutions and subject areas covered in this website. This information is held on our Active Campaign marketing platform. You can stop our marketing communications at any time, upon which your details will be deleted.
• Delivering customer services: When responding to solution enquiries and subsequently providing support and contract administration, we may store your business contact details in our Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is to ensure you are serviced in a professional and expedient way.
• Improving our website: To improve the layout of our web content, and make life easier for you (e.g. by pre-filling forms if you’ve previously visited our site) we use certain cookies. See section on Cookies below.

The data collected from this site will only be shared with another party with your consent or as necessary to provide any solution information you have requested. An example of this is where your enquiry is made outside of the geographic area in which we operate, in which case we may pass your information onto an international supplier.

See also Legitimate interest and Rights and Requests sections.

Cookies

Cloud Essentials uses third-party cookies supplied by Google Analytics, Canddi and Active Campaign.

Like many other commercial organisations the world-over, we have incorporated these cookies to enable us to understand how our site is being used and therefore how to enhance our site.

We also use some social buttons and video hosting platforms that have their own cookies. 

Google Analytics (Privacy Policy)

We measure visitors to our website using Google Analytics.  This records what pages you view within our site, how you arrived at our site and some basic information about your computer.  All of that information is anonymous – so we don’t know who you are; just that somebody visited our site.

The information we collect from analytics helps us understand what parts of our sites are doing well, how people arrive at our site and so on. Like most websites, we use this information to make our website better.

You can learn more about Google Analytics or opt out if you wish.  Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop Google Analytics from tracking any part of your visit to pages on this website. All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings.

CANDDi (Privacy Policy)

We use a third-party website analytics tools from CANDDi which tracks user interaction on our website.

Information is gathered from any forms that you may complete and any emails interactions which we have with you.

We use this information to make our websites and content better and provide a better service to you.  We do not share this with any third parties.

Active Campaign – (Privacy Policy)

Active Campaign uses cookies to ease your experience – or example, automatically remembering your details when you fill in a subsequent form.

LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other social networks

These services provide social buttons and similar features which we use on our website – such as the “Share on LinkedIn” and “Tweet” buttons.

To do so we embed code that they provide and we do not control ourselves. To function their buttons generally, know if you’re logged in. We do not have any access to that information, nor can we control how those networks use it.

Social networks, therefore, could know that you’re viewing this website if you use their services (that isn’t to say they do, but their policies may change). As our website is remarkably inoffensive and of a professional nature we imagine this is not a concern for most users.

Third-party data processors

Active Campaign – (Privacy Policy)

Active Campaign is a third-party data processor and is used to manage our enquiry forms and newsletter subscriptions.

To enable expedient processing of any enquiries that come through our web forms, your information is pushed from Active Campaign into our Microsoft Dynamics CRM (over a secure link) and a notification is emailed into our Office 365 email service.

If you subscribed to our Cloud Essentials newsletter your email address will remain within Active Campaign’s database until you specifically request removal from the list.

Disqus – (Privacy Policy)

To allow you to discuss our blog articles and some web pages we use a discussion system called Disqus.

Disqus does not identify you personally unless you are logged into Disqus, in which case it is linked to your Disqus, Google, Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Security of your personal data

Cloud Essentials takes all reasonable technical, physical, and administrative steps to help protect your personal data in our custody or control from loss, misuse and unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration and destruction.

Only authorised Cloud Essentials employees have access to your personal data. 

Data Breaches

We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the database(s) of any of our third-party data processors to any and all relevant persons and authorities within 72 hours of the breach if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen.

Relevant legislation

Along with our business and internal computer systems, this website is designed to comply with the following national and international legislation with regards to data protection and user privacy:

• UK Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA)
• EU Data Protection Directive 1995 (DPD)
• EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR)
• Protection of Personal Information Act 4, no 4 of 2013 (POPI)

This site’s compliance with the above legislation, all of which are stringent in nature, means that this site is likely compliant with the data protection and user privacy legislation set out by many other countries and territories as well. If you are unsure about whether this site is compliant with your own country of residences’ specific data protection and user privacy legislation you should contact us for clarification.

Your rights and requests

• Right to rectification – You can request that we edit any information at any time by emailing us at marketing@cloudessentials.com
• Right to be forgotten – After receiving a request to be forgotten, we will permanently delete your record and all data associated with it within 30 days of receiving the request.
• Right of portability – If requested, we will export your data so it can be transferred to a third party.
• Right to object – At any time, you may object (via opt-out) to your personal data being used for specific purposes such as direct marketing.
• Right of access – We’re transparent about the data we have and how we use it. You can contact us at any time if you’d like to access your data or if you have any questions about your data and how we’re using it.

Updates to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time-to-time, particularly as legislation and technology changes. We will notify you of changes to our privacy policy by email. You can always check this page for the latest version.