Security & data handling
Last updated: August 29, 2026 · Questions? Ask directly — you'll get the developer, not a support queue.
The short version: your Azure DevOps stays the single source of truth. Ez-ADO stores none of your work-item data, none of your credentials, and writes nothing of yours to disk — ever.
Where your data lives
- Azure DevOps is the only durable store. Ez-ADO has no database. Board data fetched from your ADO is held in server memory only, keyed to your own connection, and evicted when idle.
- No copies, no exports, no sync. The board renders your live ADO work items and writes changes straight back as ADO revisions. There is nothing to get out of sync and nothing to delete when you leave.
- Nothing is shared between connections. Every request is scoped by a hash of its own connection — two users, or two organizations, can never see each other's data, even on the same server.
How you authenticate
- Inside the Azure DevOps extension: no sign-up and no token to paste. The board uses the short-lived access token Azure DevOps itself issues to the extension for your session. It can only do what you are already allowed to do in ADO, and it expires on ADO's schedule.
- In the standalone app: you connect with your own Personal Access Token. It is kept in your browser's local storage only — never written to our disk, never logged, and sent only to your own Azure DevOps organization via our pass-through.
- Every write is attributed to the real person. Changes show up in ADO's work-item history under the name of the user who made them — not a service account.
What our server does and doesn't do
- The server is a stateless pass-through to the Azure DevOps REST API: it forwards your requests with your token, assembles the board view, and holds the result in memory for fast rendering.
- It keeps no user accounts, no sessions, and no server-side identity. Closing your browser is a complete sign-out.
- Tokens are never persisted or logged. Cache entries are keyed by a one-way hash — the raw token is not the key.
- Traffic is HTTPS end to end. The app is hosted on Microsoft Azure (App Service), in the EU.
The zero-server direction
The pass-through model above is the current architecture. The next iteration of the Azure DevOps extension is being built to run entirely inside your browser — the app ships inside the extension package and talks straight to your ADO's REST API, with no Ez-ADO server in the data path at all. If your security review requires that model, get in touch — it may already be available by the time you read this.
Marketplace & permissions
- The extension is distributed through the official Visual Studio Marketplace and requests three scopes: work items (read/write), project info (read), and user profile (read) — nothing else.
- Installation is an explicit act by your organization's admin; uninstalling removes all access instantly, because there is nothing stored to remove.
What we do collect
Honesty section: the little we do see.
- Anonymous funnel events in the standalone connect flow (e.g. "someone entered an org URL", "connect failed: bad token") — used to fix onboarding, never containing credentials.
- Feedback you choose to send through the in-app feedback button, which lands in our issue tracker with exactly what you typed.
- Standard web-server logs (IPs, timestamps) kept by the hosting platform for operations — no work-item content is ever logged.