I would be surprised if any technician would regard MyColony behind a council's firewall as significantly superior to googledocs, excepting that certain committee members might not be able to access certain details eg working vs retired. Like all databases what matters more than the database security is the security profile of the people using it.
Do I trust anyone in my committee to know who is retired and who isn't? Do my plotholders care? And there comes the rub. Providing one understands the risks of any computer system and explains those risks clearly to the community you serve, and especially take care of personal details then what is the problem one is trying to solve.
I can understand a council taking a very strict & uncompromising attitude. A council has a right to be totally paranoid about such matters. But they do so at considerable cost - and a cost that gets passed down to plotholders. And also, sadly my guess is that their attitude may work well as far as a computer system goes, but will break down when it comes to an allotment committee.
(Let me just add that some of our plotholders do like to keep their life very private. These members are very paranoid about privacy. Such people do not have their data stored. Such data would not even be added to myColony.)
After all, ALL allotment committee members worldwide will - even if they use mycolony - share personal data by email. That's a fact. So any security embedded in mycolony, no matter how it is deployed breaks down to the level of GoogleDocis when one considers the human aspects.
I consider myself computer fluent. With no disrespect intended, some of my committee members struggle to use the Internet & Email. That, my guess struggling with the Internet is true of most allotment committees. These are not professionals paid £000s by councils with secure contracts. They are volunteers.
So you pay lots of money for a secure system and then put it in the hands of ... Is the result secure? My guess any sense of security worthy of GCHQ would be a whole charade.
My allotment committee works hard to justify spending £50. The idea of spending several £100s annually for myColony - well it will never happen.
I am not saying that myColony is not good. But GoogleDocs is brilliant. For instance on my Android phone I can walk around my allotment site and annotate details via my phone on the live spreadsheet such as plot condition, trees that may need maintenance, fence maintenance etc. Also if someone makes a complaint I can log that on the complaints spreadsheet. All done over a secure connection.
The safest system is pen & paper. Add a computer and you increase risks. Add the Internet and you increase risks again. But most people accept these as a trade off for functionality.