Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
The handful of settings that carry most of the risk, and the two habits that matter more than any of them.
Why this account is worth protecting
Your Zendesk holds what customers told you: names, addresses, order details, and whatever they attached. It is a substantial store of personal data, and it is usually reachable from anywhere.
The settings that matter most
| Two-factor authentication | for every agent and admin. The single largest reduction in risk available. |
| Single sign-on | where you have it, so leaving the company removes access everywhere at once. |
| Session length | so an unattended laptop does not stay signed in indefinitely. Team members and end users are set separately, and the defaults are sixty minutes and eight hours. |
| Admin count | Fewer admins is a security setting, and most accounts have more than they need. |
| Data export, | restricted to named people where your plan allows. |
| A security contact address | so Zendesk's incident notification reaches somebody. If it goes to a person who has left, the notice arrives nowhere. |
| Social sign-in | switched off where you do not use it. Each option left on is another way in. |
Both are inactivity timeouts, so somebody working continuously is not signed out at sixty minutes. When the limit is reached the session ends and the person signs in again. Whether eight hours is right for your end users is a judgement rather than a default to override on principle, and it is worth reading the detail before changing it.
Habit one: offboard properly
Deactivate the account the day somebody leaves. An active account belonging to a former colleague is the one nobody is watching, and it is how most real incidents start.
Habit two: review access quarterly
Who is an admin, who has not signed in, who can export. Fifteen minutes, four times a year. It finds things no setting prevents.
Habit three: verify before you act
The attack no setting stops is somebody asking an agent to change an account for them. Verify independently, for instance by calling the number on the profile, and never hand over sensitive information or make a change on somebody else's say-so. A genuine user can change their own settings.
Watch what agents can reach
Roles decide who sees which tickets. An agent role with access to everything is convenient and means a compromised account exposes everything.
Where to start
Two-factor authentication and the admin list. Those two, done today, cover more ground than anything else on this page.
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