Technology

A complete system for the organization

With an emphasis on media content and business logic within the social sector and small businesses, Cornerstone is suited to perform the tasks typically solved by Content Management Systems (CMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. In traditional CMS systems, the article is the fundamental object that most other things seem to revolve around. In business systems, the people and the organizations are the objects that are at the center of the action. Cornerstone has both of these at its core so that articles and rich media can be used everywhere. Every time you enter a person as a customer, donor, recipient, member, etc. you register basic personal information only once. Therefore, there is no duplication and you get powerful searches across all business modules of the platform.

Open and standardized underlying technologies

At the core of Cornerstone is a LAMP stack with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP - world’s most widely used and proven technologies that run some of the most advanced and trafficked platforms and websites. In addition, Cornerstone also takes advantage of these popular and proven libraries and projects: VueJS, jQuery, CKeditor, Zend framework, Smarty, PDO, GraphQL, Apache Solr and Nginx.

Cornerstone’s base architecture is significant because it does not rely on any single programming language or component. Most of the underlying technologies are interchangeable which allows Cornerstone to evolve and utilize the best current practices.

Architecture

Cornerstone is designed and built as an object oriented framework. Cornerstone follows the MVC architectural pattern. Our platform's core provides a set of reusable classes which become the foundation for the modules. Modules (you might call them apps) provide the end user functionality which is served through individual windows. These can be flexibly placed using drag & drop and made available through a sophisticated access control layer.

We build Cornerstone with scalability in mind for both traffic and data volume. Cornerstone is a multi-tenant system, as a result one deployment and code base is serving all clients. This makes it easy for frequent upgrades and improvements that all clients benefit from immediately. Clients are always using the latest version of the platform.

Safe and secure cloud storage

Cornerstone is hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services), the world´s leading cloud services provider. We utilize multi-factor authentication and high level encryption on all personal information stored. Your personal information is protected by a double-layered security mechanism including access control and privacy safety. Cornerstone has received sizable grants from the Norwegian Research Council for its groundbreaking developments in secure safe storage, and the handling of privacy data. We comply with international regulations on privacy in the EU and the USA, because AWS adheres to the EU US Privacy Shield.

Scalability

Through Amazon cloud services, we have set up a virtual server grid of balanced application and database servers. Every node in the infrastructure can handle a hit for any of the websites or applications. This makes Cornerstone behave gracefully at peak loads, and it also makes it easy to quickly add more servers as the average load grows. Cornerstone scaling doesn’t require human assistance and is performed automatically based on load metrics.

Because Cornerstone is built in the cloud we have unlimited storage available. Cornerstone will never run out of disk space.

Reliability

Cloud technologies are always more reliable than bare metal hosting. On the rare occasion that one of the servers in the grid needs to be replaced or upgraded, what previously took two hours or more now takes less than two minutes. With balanced servers, the system will not take any downtime at all. All vitals of the system are set up with alarms which immediately notify the Cornerstone response team by SMS and email.

For a quick response, in case of a major failure, the system is hosted with elastic IPs.

Backups

All files stored in Cornerstone are automatically backed up with lifecycle rules in the Amazon S3 file system. We keep old versions of files and deleted files for 1 year. In addition, we make a full copy of the database every 24 hours and store multiple copies securely for a period of time, considering relevant privacy legislation.

Customizable

The Cornerstone Platform comes fully hosted, and with our state-of-the-art themes system, you can style all available functionality any way you want. You can private label Cornerstone and host it yourself, but please note that this will only make sense for very high volume users or for users with very specific data security requirements.

Cornerstone comes with a wide variety of both media and business modules, but it is possible to make custom modules that will blend in with the rest of the platform.