Security & privacy
Most clouds ask you to trust them. Watchtower is built so you don't have to — privacy and resilience are baked into the architecture, not offered as a paid tier. Here's what that means, in plain terms.
Every link between servers is wrapped in modern encryption plus a quantum-resistant layer — so even a future quantum computer recording today's traffic can't unlock it later. This isn't an add-on; it's how the servers talk at all.
The firewall blocks everything and only opens a port when a human deliberately, reviewably decides to. Sensitive services — your database, your secrets, your remote-access tools — never face the public internet at all. There is no accidental exposure.
Files, secrets and disks are encrypted on the drives they live on, with keys held in a dedicated secrets vault. A stolen disk is a brick — it reveals nothing without the keys.
A single account with mandatory two-factor authentication unlocks every app — and there is no password-only side door to slip through. Sign-in is centralized, so access is managed in exactly one place.
Databases are dumped and each service's state is mirrored, so your data survives losing a whole machine — not just a bad disk. Backups you can't restore after a node dies don't count, so they're built to survive exactly that.
Intrusion detection watches the logs and the running system, images are scanned for known holes before they ship, and the most sensitive data is walled off from everything else. The system is designed to notice trouble, not just hope it never comes.
Because the whole estate is defined as code, these protections are applied the same way to every service, every deploy — no forgotten box, no drifted config. Security here is a property of the system, not a to-do list someone has to remember.
Don't take our word for it — the firewall rules, the encryption config, and the security reasoning are all open on GitLab.