This article describes Enhanced Disaster Recovery for Zendesk.
This article includes the following sections:
- About Enhanced Disaster Recovery
- Key features of Enhanced Disaster Recovery
- Exceptions to Enhanced Disaster Recovery
About Enhanced Disaster Recovery
Enhanced Disaster Recovery enhances the protection of your Zendesk data and provides for faster recovery in the event of a disaster that interrupts your Zendesk service. With this feature, your Zendesk data is replicated in real-time and you’ll receive priority cloud resiliency.
Key features of Enhanced Disaster Recovery
Key features of Enhanced Disaster Recovery include:
- Real-time data replication: Zendesk will replicate your data in real-time within and across Amazon Web Service (AWS) Availability Zones, ensuring extra redundancy and lessening the chance of data loss in the event of a significant disaster. This replication occurs within the same region as your Zendesk service data.
- Availability Zone Redundancy: Zendesk infrastructure within each region is spread across two, and sometimes three, physically diverse Availability Zones to provide increased redundancy. In the event of a significant issue impacting an Availability Zone, this structure allows Zendesk to recover within the surviving Availability Zone(s). The secondary Availability Zones, along with AWS elastic scaling capabilities, provide for quicker recovery of service, or in some cases, continuous operation.
- Traffic Prioritization: Enhanced disaster recovery combines AWS Availability Zone redundancy with our Cloudflare edge network capability to prioritize Enhanced Disaster Recovery Subscriber traffic while additional capacity is restored for other subscribers.
- Priority Recovery Planning: Zendesk maintains a program of test activities and events to validate that our plans for priority recovery of the Services are effective. The scenarios for these exercises vary and test different elements of Zendesk’s business continuity and disaster recovery plans to validate the overall strength of the plan.
In the event of a disaster, the following objectives apply:
- 4 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Zendesk will aim to restore normal operations for your Zendesk Support account within four hours from the time a disaster is declared, unless a disaster, or multiple disasters, impacts all of the Availability Zones used on an account.
- Under 1 hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Zendesk will target one hour or less of data loss for your account. This is calculated from the point of the disruption, not from Zendesk’s disaster declaration.
- Service and traffic prioritization: Recovery for your Zendesk account will be prioritized over the accounts of other subscribers who have not purchased Enhanced Disaster Recovery commitments. Additionally, your account’s traffic will be prioritized over other accounts within the Zendesk Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Exceptions to Enhanced Disaster Recovery
Enhanced Disaster Recovery and the practices described in this article do not apply to the functionality within Zendesk Suite, Support and Chat integrations with third party messaging providers, Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Zendesk Sell, Zendesk Sunshine and Custom Objects, the Custom Events, and Unified Profiles to the extent such functionality is available in Zendesk Suite and Support. If you purchase a Zendesk Suite, Zendesk Support Suite, or Sales Suite service plan that includes Enhanced Disaster Recovery, Enhanced Disaster Recovery will only apply to the underlying services that are covered by the feature.
7 Comments
Hi,
What (if any) is the cost of this safeguard?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Stephen Kairys!
I've gone ahead & created a ticket on your behalf so our sales team can discuss how much the cost would be for your subdomain.
We'll reach out to you soon!
Hi,
What are the parameters on which this would be activated or available to be instigated?
Assume this covers us where something happens on the server location or a natural disaster etc. Would we be covered or able to use this feature if we ourselves did something that upset or caused data outage in our Zendesk environment?
Thanks
James
When you mention "data", does this only include everything on the ticketing side?
Or what about Guide, Guide configurations (categories/sections), Portal customizations, community posts, Explore dashboards and reports?
Mary P
The best people that can answer these questions will be our Sales team. I suggest initiating a Messaging session to connect with them directly.
What exactly does disaster recovery entail? What can be recovered? For example:
- If a help center is accidentally deleted or if the content structure has been significantly disrupted, can we restore old help centers? ZD support tried to do this for us once, and it did not work as expected. This would be a great feature that would give our editorial team some peace of mind.
- If there are severe disruptions to our ticket or messaging data (say, for example, someone gets an API key phished or an employee accidentally bulk deletes something), can we restore old tickets that have been deleted or altered?
- Can we restore all admin settings and user profiles to their past state?
Given the lack of native ability to track, limit, and manage API requests, I'm always worried something will go catastrophically wrong, and we won't be able to revert to an older state.
Hi Brian,
I recommend contacting Zendesk Customer Support so they can help answer your questions.
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