Confidentiality and Materials
Effective: 6 September 2026
Last reviewed: 12 September 2026
This document forms part of the ApexIQ Companion Service Terms and applies to every Topic. It is written to be given to a security reviewer, a procurement team, or a general counsel without further explanation.
Where a Topic destroys material on a different timetable, its Service Description says so and governs.
1. What this covers
"Your material" means everything you send us for a request: the subject matter itself, the brief, and any companion input the Topic requires.
2. Your material is confidential, and it stays yours
We treat your material as confidential from the moment it arrives.
Nothing in this service transfers any right in your material to us. You own it. We hold it only for as long as it takes to do the work, and only to do the work.
3. You must be entitled to send it
Before you send us anything, satisfy yourself that you may.
Material of the kinds we handle routinely contains information belonging to someone other than you:
- a response to an invitation to tender contains the issuer's questions, and those are often supplied under terms which forbid disclosure to a third party;
- a response to a security questionnaire describes a customer's control posture;
- a partner brief or a partner enablement pack contains a partner's plans;
- a board pack may contain information which is not public;
- a case study or reference story describes a named customer.
We cannot know what you have agreed with those parties. Only you can. Under section 6 of the Service Terms (Your material) you warrant that you are entitled to disclose the material to us for this purpose, and you indemnify us if that turns out to be wrong.
Where you are unsure, the safe options are to redact the third party's material before sending, to obtain their consent, or not to send it at all.
4. What we do with it
We use your material for 1 purpose: performing the service you asked for.
We do not:
- disclose it to any other subscriber;
- publish it, quote it, or use it as an example, a case study, a template, or marketing material;
- use it to train, tune, or evaluate any model;
- use it to inform work for a competitor of yours; or
- keep a copy after the point stated in section 7.
5. Who reads it, and how the work is produced
Our own reviewers, and only those working on your request.
Some Topics draft with AI assistance and finish by hand. Where a Topic does, its Service Description says so plainly, names what is sent, and states that a reviewer checks the work before it reaches you. The judgement in what we return is ours, whichever tool helped produce it.
Quality Audits works this way. Section 6 of its Service Description sets out the process, and the Privacy Notice names the supplier, its purpose, and its location.
We send your material to no other sub-contractor, and we use no offshore review team. Where that changes we will say so here and in the Privacy Notice before it takes effect, and you will be able to object.
Our accountants and legal advisers may see engagement records under a duty of confidence. They do not receive your material.
6. How it is held
However your material reaches us, it is held the same way. It goes into our managed business systems, access is limited to the people working on your request, and accounts carry multi-factor authentication.
Material is not copied onto removable media, personal devices, or unmanaged storage, and is not held outside our managed systems. Storage is encrypted at rest by our provider.
Each Topic's Service Description names the channels by which its material may be sent. Today every Topic takes material by email. Where we add another route, such as a secure upload, it is stated there before it is used, and everything in this section applies to it unchanged. Nothing here depends on how material arrived.
Where the channel is email, it is transmitted over TLS if the sending and receiving systems support it, but it is not end-to-end encrypted, and you should treat that as a known property of that channel. Where material is sensitive enough that this matters, tell us before you send it and we will agree another route.
7. When we destroy it
Each Topic states when the material you send is destroyed, and its Service Description governs. Those timetables are designed properties of each service rather than concessions, and they are not variable by negotiation.
For Quality Audits, everything you send is deleted when the report is sent. Section 11 of the Quality Audits Service Description (What we delete, and when) sets that out in full, together with the consequences you should plan for. For Readiness, everything you send is deleted when the pack is sent, and Section 10 of the Readiness Service Description (Your material) sets that out.
Where a timetable does not suit a particular piece of material, the answer is to send it another way, or not to send it.
8. What we keep
| What we keep | Why | For how long |
|---|---|---|
| The work we produced | It is our work product and our record of what we advised | 7 years |
| The engagement record: who asked, for what, when, what was agreed | To evidence the engagement and to defend a claim | 7 years |
| Correspondence | The same | 7 years |
We do not keep your material beyond the period its Topic states. What we return describes something we may no longer hold.
9. Our confidential information
The internal standards against which we work, and the methods by which we apply them, are our confidential information and our intellectual property.
What we return states the finding and not the method which produced it. That is deliberate, and it is why nothing we return names an internal standard, a weighting, or a threshold. It is not evasion: it is the boundary between what you bought, which is the finding, and what we own, which is the method.
You may share what we return inside your organisation and with your professional advisers under a duty of confidence. Section 10 of the Service Terms (The deliverable) sets out the licence in full.
10. If something arrives which should not have
If you realise you have sent us something you should not have, tell us at security@apexedgesalesengineering.com and we will delete it and confirm that we have.
If we form the view that we are holding material we should not hold, whether because it breaches the Acceptable Use document or because it appears to belong to a third party who has not agreed to its disclosure, we may delete it immediately without completing the work, and we will tell you what we did.
11. Duration
The obligations in this document survive the end of any engagement, and continue for as long as the information remains confidential.
12. Contact
| Purpose | Address |
|---|---|
| Security concerns, and material sent in error | security@apexedgesalesengineering.com |
| Data protection and individual rights | privacy@apexedgesalesengineering.com |
| Everything else about this document | legal@apexedgesalesengineering.com |