Contact Center Disaster Recovery

8x8 Contact Center introduces disaster recovery to X Series customers. 8x8 Disaster Recovery Companion Service provides business continuity if the data center hosting your primary tenant suffers a disaster or a site failure. 8x8 Contact Center Disaster Recovery (DR) companion tenant is a scheduled replica of your primary contact center tenant in the standby mode. This instance of your Contact Center tenant is hosted in a geographically diverse data center and synchronizes periodically with the primary tenant. Contact Center admins configure disaster recovery in the 8x8 Configuration Manager. Should a critical outage occur, Contact Center admins can enable and switch over to a DR tenant with a click. On-demand administration is available using the 8x8 Configuration Manager application, whether you just want more flexibility in everyday call routing, or plan ahead for business continuity during a disaster. You can divert your contact center inbound telephony traffic to your companion tenant or alternate phone numbers.

The DR tenant synchronizes with the primary tenant weekly once by default, but can be customized to synchronize as often as hourly upon request.

Learn how to plan for a disaster event.

Audience

This topic is intended for 8x8 Contact Center administrators responsible for enabling Disaster Recovery or channel rerouting for their contact center.

Availability

The 8x8 Contact Center Disaster Recovery Companion Service is available to all 8x8 Contact Center customers based on subscription.

Features

  • Maintain business continuity via voice channels during a disaster
  • Access a companion tenant on a geographically-diverse data center
  • Synchronize the companion tenant settings with the primary tenant periodically for an exact replica
  • Define and validate rerouting plans in advance
  • Switch and manage routing plans quickly
  • Continue to serve your customers via email and chat channels

Limitations

  • Configuration changes to the companion DR tenant do not sync with the primary tenant, they must be manually copied.
  • Virtual Contact Center CRM data gathered on the companion DR tenant does not sync with the primary tenant. For example, all chat transcripts and emails treated in the CRM are not transferred to the primary tenant.
  • You may experience a temporary slow down of chat and SMS interactions flowing into the queues during the switch.

Rerouting Plans

Virtual Contact Center facilitates channel or agent rerouting using routing plans. A routing plan determines how your contact center traffic is channeled. During normal operation, you can route traffic to the primary tenant. During a disaster, you can redirect the traffic to a DR companion tenant or forward them to another phone number. By default, all routing plans are set to direct inbound traffic to the primary tenant. The following built-in rerouting options in Virtual Contact Center help you maintain business continuity:

  • Primary Plan: By default, this plan is in effect during normal business operation. This plan routes all interactions to the primary contact center tenant. This plan can be modified, if desired. Contact center users log into the primary tenant to receive and process interactions.

  • Disaster Recovery Plan: Subscribe to Disaster Recovery Companion Service, which provides access to a secondary tenant in a geographically diverse data center. This plan routes all interactions to the companion tenant when activated. This plan can be modified, if desired. Contact center users are redirected to the companion tenant to receive and process interactions.

    Note: The Companion Disaster Recovery Tenant is an add-on service that can be purchased separately. It requires prior configuration.

  • Alternate Plan: This plan serves users with or without disaster recovery services.

    • For users with Disaster Recovery services, this plan offers a platform to test and validate the routing options before activating the disaster recovery plan. As a best practice, use this plan for testing your rerouting options.
    • For users without the Disaster Recovery services, this plan offers call forwarding choices. Route your contact center inbound calls to an alternate phone number such as a phone queue or workplace.