Contract Management Security with Sirion: Risks, Protections, and Best Practices

At Sirion, we work with diverse set of industries and customers seeking to transform their current contract lifecycle management processes. To help them through their decision cycle, we employ a three-pronged approach of;

Design – Realize – Transform

The aim behind this three-pronged philosophy is to design a roadmap to build a great user experience while incorporating and strengthening the feature design parameters in Sirion. The goal is to improve the usability of Sirion for the customers while preserving the trust and privacy of their contract information.

As organizations digitize more of their contract workflows, the security of these digital agreements becomes mission-critical.

What is Contract Management Security?

Contract management security refers to the strategies, protocols, and technologies that protect contract data and documents across the contract lifecycle. It ensures that sensitive business agreements are:

• Stored securely in the cloud
• Protected against unauthorized access
• Compliant with industry regulations like SOC 2 and ISO 27001
• Accessible only by verified users

As contract volume and complexity rise, businesses must defend their digital agreements against cyberattacks, insider threats, and misconfigurations—especially when leveraging multi-tenant CLM solutions like Sirion.

Designing for security requires more than just defense—it means building trust into the architecture itself. That’s where Sirion’s design parameters come in.

What are Design Parameters?

Design parameters are the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the functional characteristics of a product or system that are input to its design process. These parameters determine the cost, design, and risk tradeoffs in the product’s development.

In Sirion’s case, the design parameters broadly include (but not limited to) security, multi-tenancy, performance & scalability and migration impacts. These are also recognized as non-functional attributes of the system that defines the user and the system environment.

These features are highlighted here since they also characterize the slippery slope in product development, where mistakes often happen while designing any web application. In the subsequent sections you will find an overview of our philosophy and behind the scenes glimpse of these feature design parameters.

These parameters not only support innovation but also act as guardrails against potential risks. Let’s look at what those risks might look like in the real world.

Common Contract Security Threats

Understanding these risks helps guide secure system design and preventive action.

Knowing the risks is the first step. The next is engineering your system to prevent them—right from day one. Here’s how Sirion does it.

Sirion’s Approach to Contract Management Security

One aspect that always comes up in our conversations with customers is security. Most importantly “Are my critical business documents and contracts secure in the cloud?” So, if you are evaluating a solution like Sirion to help you realize more value from your contracts – and since we are a strong proponent of cloud technology– it is likely that you must also have questions like these.

To elaborate on the security aspect, at Sirion, the security design parameters are included right from requirement management stage till the development stage with various phases like;

• Requirement gathering
• Product feature discussions
• Software design guidelines
• Design documents
• Architecture diagrams

Our focus always is to envision and understand how the data can be further secured. We constantly prod ourselves on;

• What are the various tools to assess the security threats and pre-empt them?
• How can we forecast the possible attacks during the testing phase?
• The preventive measures we can take at the coding, reviewing, testing and implementation level

At Sirion, security is not a solitary piece, it is a progression from “project initiation” till the “Go live” phase, classified into three broad categories:

• Data Security
• Login/Session management
• Attacks (Like OWASP)

Our secure-by-design approach manifests across every layer of our platform—from how we manage data to how we govern access.

Key Components of Sirion’s Data Security Framework

From a client’s perspective, data security is one of the most important piece of the security puzzle. It incorporates three chief principles,

• Confidentiality: A set of rules that limits the access of information.
• Integrity: Assurance that the information is trustworthy and accurate.
• Availability: Stipulated rights to use the information by authorized users.

Access controls can be further divided into two main areas:

• Physical access – controls over who can enter the premises and who can access personal data
• Logical access – controls to ensure employees only have access to the appropriate software, data and devices necessary to perform their specific roles.

Any breach not only affects client’s trust but also of the employees while putting the whole organization at risk.

At Sirion, we have instilled a culture of keeping the security aspect at the forefront, beginning from the system designing process till the product release. It could be a feature requirement or even an informal discussion between the developers and quality assurance teams, we prioritize this thought process in all our activities while creating great products.

A foundational part of that architecture is controlling who can access what—and when.

How Sirion Handles Login Security and Session Control

A user authentication and authorization mechanism are required to prevent customer’s data from getting in the wrong hands.

Consider a scenario where end-user logs into Sirion and forgets to log out. There may be a possibility that an unauthorized user may access their information and takes an undesirable action like modifying or deleting sensitive data. To prevent this the system must be designed in a way that if the user is inactive or has overlooked to logout from the application or left the application unattended for a long duration then the system automatically logs out, thus saving the integrity of the system.

But even with strong login controls, vulnerabilities can exist elsewhere. Proactively defending against cyberattacks is essential.

Preventing Contract-Based Cyberattacks

An attack is an attempt to alter, destroy or steal the customer’s sensitive information to make an unauthorized access to any data repository.

We continually consider scenarios during the development phase for example if there is any part of the code that is attack prone or It could be a “key-> value” pair in one of the URL parameters, enabling an option for an outsider to execute a rogue script or any left out ports exposed to the outside world during server configuration.

Hence, a system must be designed in such a way that one should able to execute the following tasks:

• Can we check the various possible attacks by an unauthorized user?
• What preventive measures can be taken to stop these attacks?
• What are the various tools to view these various attacks?

As a team, it is non-negotiable for us to leave the security aspect of the thought process at any stage of our engineering processes.

To consistently guard against these threats, we recommend a layered security strategy. Here’s a checklist of best practices we follow—and advise.

Checklist: Best Practices for CLM Security

Sirion recommends these foundational practices for CLM security:

• Enforce MFA and strong password policies
• Encrypt data at rest and in transit
• Use role-based access control (RBAC)
• Auto-terminate idle sessions
• Maintain detailed audit trails
• Conduct penetration testing and code reviews
• Integrate with secure, SOC 2-compliant third-party tools

Sirion follows these standards as part of its engineering and client onboarding processes.

Of course, security claims are only as strong as the standards that validate them. Here’s how Sirion aligns with the world’s leading certifications.

Beyond best practices, enterprises should ensure their CLM platform includes the following capabilities by design.

Must have Security Features in a CLM Platform

Here are some foundational features to look for in a secure CLM platform:

• Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Define who can see, edit, approve, or download contracts—right down to the clause level.
• Audit-Ready Logging: Every user action, from login to redline, is timestamped and traceable—critical for compliance and internal investigations.
• Multi-Tenant Isolation Controls: In SaaS environments, each tenant’s data is logically isolated with no cross-visibility—even in shared infrastructure.
• Session Management Rules: Auto-timeouts, IP-based restrictions, and adaptive login workflows to reduce the risk of session hijacking.
• Secure API Gateways: Any third-party integration (e.g., CRM, ERP, e-signature tools) goes through verified, encrypted channels with access controls in place.
• Built-In Encryption Management: Contracts are encrypted at rest and in transit- with internal key rotation policies, not just vendor reliance.
• Change Control and Migration Safeguards: No deployment or migration goes live without rollback plans, dependency checks, and security validation gates.

With these enterprise-grade features in place, security shifts from being a checkbox to a business enabler. But features are only part of the equation—certifications and compliance matter too.

Security Certifications and Compliance Standards at Sirion

Sirion aligns with globally recognized data security and privacy standards to ensure that your contracts remain secure, compliant, and enterprise-ready.

• SOC 2 Type II: Sirion has implemented internal controls based on the Trust Services Criteria for security, availability, and confidentiality. This ensures that your data is continuously protected through rigorous auditing and monitoring procedures.
• ISO/IEC 27001: As part of our information security management system (ISMS), Sirion follows ISO 27001 best practices to manage and mitigate data security risks across infrastructure, application, and personnel.
• GDPR Compliance: Sirion supports General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance through features such as data subject access controls, audit trails, and secure data handling within the EU and globally.
• HIPAA Readiness: For customers in the healthcare sector, Sirion’s architecture supports data protection protocols aligned with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), ensuring the safeguarding of PHI (Protected Health Information).
• Data Residency & Sovereignty Support: Sirion supports enterprise needs for regional data storage and residency in compliance with local regulations, ensuring customers meet specific jurisdictional mandates.
• Vendor Risk Management: Sirion maintains a secure SDLC, conducts regular third-party penetration testing, and performs due diligence on sub-processors to ensure end-to-end data integrity.

Enterprise customers also rely on Sirion’s ability to securely scale across geographies and business units. That’s where our multi-tenant architecture comes in.

Multi-Tenant Architecture: Balancing Flexibility with Security

The term “software multi-tenancy” refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of a software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance.

In a multi-tenancy environment, the system can enable the same feature across all clients, with minimal or no customization. This also supports easy upgrades to all clients while promoting cost and time savings for an organization.

Sirion is a multi-tenant SaaS thus, during the design, coding, code-reviews or testing scope of a feature, we need to ensure that the multi-tenancy aspect is being deliberated adequately so that the same feature can be enabled if required for multiple clients, majorly via front-end configurations.

As an illustration, while doing an integration with a third-party software, we cannot afford to build integration framework which will just work in a specific scenario. If required, we should also be able to enable integration of the same software for other clients as well.

To achieve this kind of output, we need to think right from the beginning of feature design that “How multi-tenancy parameter does not get compromise while building the feature?”

Supporting multiple clients securely isn’t just about design—it’s also about sustaining high performance under load.

Securing Performance and Scalability in CLM Systems

Performance and scalability are interlinked to each other. Scalability is the process of expanding the current system’s framework and performance is the way for measuring the system’s behavior on its scalability.

Let us take an example of a single entity creation. In this feature, a user must perform the same steps multiple times to perform a task which could be very time consuming and tedious. To overcome this challenge, we designed a feature for bulk entity data update with which the user can update multiple entities at once.

At the same time, we also need to ponder if it would impact the scheduler’s performance, or if we scale our system to perform bulk operations, how would it impact our current system’s performance, or if the listings download for an entity data is currently ten thousand, what would happen if the limit is increased to 2X or 3X? How does it impact Sirion’s performance?

If one of the clients asked you to raise the listing download size and the system started to respond slower than its usual speed, it indicates that the system isn’t capable enough to scale the listing download size which directly impacts system’s performance.

Let’s take another scenario – Currently, we have the provision to upload the excel file for bulk data entry. The questions, we asked ourselves were – is our system capable enough to directly read the file from the FTP path? How much time would the backend services take to perform such tasks? How does it impact Sirion’s performance?

So, if Sirion can upload the service levels in bulk with five thousand being the upper limit. And on one of our client’s request, we upgrade this limit to ten thousand which makes the system sluggish. The alternate to this is to abort the process and break the file into two parts to perform the operation again which can lead to several other manual changes in the excel file like:

• How much data was uploaded into the system before aborting the bulk operation?
• Manual errors like filters issues, copy & paste error while splitting the file into two parts.

Hence, while designing a product, the pertinent question one should ask: “Is the existing framework easily scalable for the future load?”

And as your system evolves, maintaining security during migrations is just as important as during day-to-day operations.

Managing Migration Without Compromising Security

Migration is the process of implementing or enhancing new features without hampering the existing one.

At Sirion, we focus on these five questions before any migration is done;

• How will I manage risk?
• How will I track and document existing data dependencies?
• How will I document and integrate new data, system functions, and processes?
• How will I execute post-migration testing?
• How will I avoid/manage downtime?

This article emphasized on feature design parameter like security, multi-tenancy, performance – scalability and migration impacts. For a good requirement management process, it is necessary to include these parameters in the standard guidelines for designing the software. We hope that this would be of help to you in comprehending and understanding the utility of these feature design parameter while designing any web application from the grounds up.

Conclusion: Embedding Security at the Core of CLM

Contract management isn’t just about faster approvals or smarter workflows—it’s about safeguarding your most sensitive business relationships. As contracts evolve into digital assets that drive revenue, compliance, and risk strategy, their protection must be built into every layer of your CLM platform.

At Sirion, security is not an afterthought—it’s a design principle. From access controls and encryption to multi-tenant scalability and migration readiness, every feature is engineered with trust in mind. Whether you’re managing thousands of supplier agreements or navigating post-merger integration, Sirion gives you the control, visibility, and assurance you need.

Frequently Asked Questions About Contract Security