About Us

Appsessment is proudly created by the same creators of Aussie Childcare Network. Both Appsessment and Aussie Childcare Network are created by an Australian registered private company under the name "Aussie Childcare Network Pty Ltd" (ABN 48 614 251 704) with our prime location based in Sydney, NSW.

History:

We first started developing the Aussie Childcare Network website way back in 2009 since we found a real need for a unique website dedicated purely for Early Childhood Educators and Students. This website took off very quickly and we take pride in saying that we are probably 'the first successful website with dedicated support for educators in Australia'! Over the years, we have learnt a lot from this and soon Aussie Childcare Network evolved to become a brand that a lot of educators and students trusted. It's now been 10 years since we have been working full time in creating tens of thousands of resources for everything related to Early Childhood Education and we have over 60,000 users who are registered with Aussie Childcare Network and several thousands of educators using Appsessment at the moment.

Appsessment was born:

Over the 10 years of our experience in this field, we have seen many childcare applications come and go. We found some to be very commercial, some of them to be missing something, most of them are not Australian and some we felt is not professional nor streamlined enough. We had a very different vision of how we would like a Documentation App to be. Over the years, we have had many of our Aussie Childcare Network users requesting us to create our own application for documentation in Early Childhood Services which encouraged us to develop Appsessment. Our principle is that "when doing something, it should be done right". Hence, we took 4 full years to plan, develop, write, replan, rewrite, test and then eventually release Appsessment on 11 March 2017.

Our Vision:

We want Appsessment to become "the" Application that works for every educators, no matter what their requirements are and introduce them to a more streamlined approach when it comes to digital documentation. This is certainly very ambitious and we believe we can get there. Appsessment is evolving everyday and the amount of work we put in it is incredible. We listen to every feedback from every user, positive or negative, we incorporate all of that in the application. A lot of features are eventually community driven and this is what keeps us extremely motivated and focussed in developing Appsessment really well.

Development Cycle:

Appsessment has a very active development cycle. We are very proud to say that we are perhaps one of the most active childcare application in terms of the development cycle with so many new updates released so frequently, every reports and fixes are added very promptly and we aim to excel in our customer service. This is our pride and we work hard to achieve that. If you check out our past releases, you will be surprised to see the number of new features that we added to Appsessment and that too in record time. We have a very closely integrated development team and everything is developed in-house with extensive testing, no compromise to quality and with security as our priority. We do not use any third party to develop our application since we feel an application that involves the handling of children data should be crafted very carefully and seriously. Hence, we have our own trusted development team who are always working on making Appsessment even better than it is today.

Location:

We are an Australian company and our main location is in Hornsby situated in Sydney, Australia. We run and operate our own dedicated servers and our servers are located in the Datacentre in Sydney, Australia.

Data Management:

Since Appsessment is specifically built for children information, we take extra precautions to ensure the child data are safely protected. We do not claim ownership to the data and all data created from the Centre's App belongs to that service. The vast majority of personal information we handle are stored and hosted in our server that is located in Sydney, Australia. This includes all child information, photos, file uploads, documentation created, comments and all personal information related to children, parents and educators in Appsessment. Which means these data are protected under the Australian laws.

Data Archive and Destruction Policy:

In regards to data archive and destruction policy, we will host the data in our secure server during the centre's subscription period. In the event of cancellation of the centre's app, we will permanently delete all data in the centre's app and this includes all updates created, conversations, photos and files that were uploaded from their App. Once it is deleted, it cannot be recovered. Since we do not claim ownership of the data, we delete all data when the centre deletes their app in Appsessment and we do not archive these data.

Security Measures:

Appsessment follows generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information and here are some of the security measures we follow:

Encrypted Communication: All communication between our users and our servers are encrypted via industry-standard secure sockets layer (SSL). Since we have TLS on the API, it prevents the credentials being sniffed in transit.
Backup and Disaster Recovery: Our servers are protected by R1Soft for server backups with continuous data protection and data recovery in place.
Server Security: We have dedicated server admins and engineers and have a 24-hour monitoring system in place. Our server admins ensure our servers are pro-actively monitored, secured with a firewall and patched with the latest updates.
Server Hardware and Location: We have invested a lot in servers to have a high-performance server with powerful systems management, exceptional reliability and uptime. Our servers are located in the Datacentre in Sydney, Australia that operates N+1 across all critical infrastructure with regular testing and maintenance. Our servers are protected by N+1 Redundant UPS power, N+1 Backup generators, N+1 Cooling infrastructure, Regular testing and maintenance, Fire detection and suppression systems, Intrusion detection and access control and 24/7 environmental monitoring.
Password standards: We use secure Bcrypt hashing for storing user passwords which is almost impossible to crack.

Apart from the above, our software has been built ground up with security in concern. This is the reason why we do not use any third party to develop our application nor use cms which may be prone to vulnerabilities. Our software is being developed completely in-house to ensure there are very high-level standards in our coding, implementation and security techniques used. It is very important to us more than anything. Since we do not subcontract our application development, we can control our access policy as well.

Also, the application is closely integrated with account permissions set to allow appropriate access. This is to ensure that users can only see the data they have access to and even the static assets such as images are protected so an authentication check is done for every requests to secure the data. The only people who can view the child's updates are Educators who have permission to view that child data in the centre's app and Parents of the children who are linked to that documentation. Apart from them, no other parents or users can access that information.

Conclusion:

This is the benefit of using Appsessment when compared to using a general Social Network website or applications that do not follow extra precautionary steps to protect child information since Appsessment is built especially for Early Childhood Services with measures to ensure the information are protected. Since we have been developing and creating tons of resources in this childcare industry for over a decade and we are very passionate about our work, you sure can rest assured that you are in good hands.