Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Enterprise Plus |
| Access | Admin |
Stronger recovery commitments for accounts that cannot be without support: four hours to restore, an hour or less of data loss, and a list of products it does not cover at all. Those first two figures are what a continuity plan is built on and what an auditor asks for.
The two numbers
| Recovery time | Zendesk aims to restore normal operations for your Support account within four hours from the time a disaster is declared. |
| Data loss | Zendesk targets one hour or less of data loss for your account. |
Read the first one carefully. The clock starts when a disaster is declared, not when your agents notice something is wrong, and the two are not the same moment. Plan for the gap in between as well.
What you get for it
Your data is replicated in real time within and across AWS Availability Zones, in the same region as your Zendesk service data. Recovery of your account is prioritised over accounts without it, and your traffic is prioritised within Zendesk's content delivery network.
What it does not cover
This is the part worth reading before you present it internally as covering your support operation. It does not apply to third-party messaging providers, Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Zendesk Sell, Zendesk WFM, Zendesk QA, Zendesk Sunshine, custom objects, custom events or unified profiles, in any configuration.
So if your workflow leans on custom objects, or your quality process on Zendesk QA, those are outside this arrangement and belong in your own continuity plan.
Who needs it
Organisations where support being unavailable has consequences beyond inconvenience: emergency services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or anyone with a contractual continuity obligation. For most businesses the standard arrangements are appropriate.
The question that settles it: what happens if your support platform is unavailable for several hours? If the answer is that customers wait and everybody is mildly frustrated, this is not for you. If it involves safety or a contractual penalty, it probably is.
It is not a substitute for your own plan
You still need to know how customers reach you while the platform is unavailable, who tells them, and how work that arrived during the outage gets picked up. No supplier commitment answers those.
Write the fallback down: a phone number, a monitored mailbox, a page you can publish. Decided in advance and known to the team, because during an outage nobody has the attention to invent one. Then rehearse it once, because an hour spent walking through "the platform is down, what do we do" finds gaps no document reveals.
What your own account is covered by is a contractual matter. Ask pluscloud support and we will confirm it against your agreement.
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