Business Resilience

Zendesk’s Global Business Resilience Program’s mission is to ensure Zendesk has the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to business disruptions, safeguard people and assets, while maintaining continuous business operations.

Zendesk  achieves resiliency through four principal areas of focus: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Incident Management and Crisis Management. Zendesk maintains our readiness by proactively assessing operational risks, establishing contingency plans, and administering incident response and crisis management training.

Zendesk assesses and mitigates potential business disruptions through our Business Resilience (BR) Program. Under this program, all critical business functions and  locations are required to maintain and exercise alternate operation strategies. The Resilience Program team validates that each business unit’s resiliency strategies are effective and meet the policy established by the program. For critical business operations, we conduct internal/external audits of business continuity plans and moderate annual exercises to ensure their plan efficiently mitigates realistic disruptions and meets compliance certifications and memberships

Zendesk maintains a risk framework that accounts for the evaluation of our facilities, technology, applications, data, processes and overall organization to ensure our risk mitigation strategy operates at multiple levels with broad coverage.

Within the Business Resilience program we maintain governance through our support model, Business Resilience Steering Committee and Incident Management Council.

In the event of a business disruption, we have plans designed to allow us to continue operations of critical functions, we accomplish this in part by:

Using redundant processing capacity at other locations.

Designing our technology and systems to support the recovery processes for critical business functions.

Using business and technology teams that are responsible for activating and managing the recovery process.

Exercising our recovery procedures and testing those procedures on a regular basis.

When it comes to disaster recovery, as part of our strategy, Zendesk leverages rigorous business impact and risk analysis to identify applications/services that are critical to each of our products.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Advanced Technology Partner of Zendesk. By building within the AWS environment, we benefit from all the partnership has to offer. Our applications/services are hosted in separate Availability Zones (AZ) using industry-standard practices to copy data across multiple AZs in real time.

In addition to all the business continuity and disaster recovery efforts for all Zendesk customers, some may prefer an additional level of redundancy and recoverability, which can be found through our Enhanced Disaster Recovery.