Disaster Recovery for Partner Telephony

Salesforce Core and Omni Capabilities Hosted in a First-Party Data Center have an Outage

In this scenario, the site switching disaster recovery mechanism is automatically activated with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of about 1 hour. This disaster recovery mechanism ensures business continuity in the case of an outage of the Salesforce Core and Omni capabilities hosted in a first-party data center. In this case, it’s assumed that the Salesforce RealTime and telephony provider microservices do not have an outage. During the RTO time, to maintain your business continuity, work directly with your telephony provider to handle customer calls.

Salesforce Core and Omni capabilities Hosted in Hyperforce have an Outage

In this scenario, Salesforce doesn’t support disaster recovery options because Hyperforce is designed for High Availability (HA) with no outage. During this outage scenario, you can work with your telephony provider for disaster recovery to ensure business continuity. In this case, it’s assumed that the Salesforce RealTime and telephony provider microservices do not have an outage.

Salesforce RealTime Microservice has an Outage

Salesforce RealTime microservice provides the telephony integration service layer between the telephony provider and the Salesforce core. Salesforce RealTime microservice is responsible for creating voice calls, executing Omni flows, handling real-time transcriptions, syncing contact records, and Voicemail.

In the case of an outage of the Salesforce RealTime microservices, the reps can continue handling the voice calls on the Salesforce application because:

• The service degraded voice calls allow reps to handle voice calls on the Salesforce Core even though the voice call creation has failed on the Salesforce RealTime microservice. See Voice Resiliency for Service Cloud Voice.
• Omni fallback mode routes the voice calls to the reps even though Salesforce RealTime microservices are unavailable. See Routing Work with Omni-Channel Fallback Mode.

During the Salesforce RealTime microservices outage, features such as Omni flows, contact records, real-time transcriptions, and voice mails aren’t available. You can use Service Cloud Voice (SCV) APIs for a backfill of all the data, such as voicemails, contact records, and transcriptions. See Salesforce Voice with Telephony Providers Implementation Guide.

In this case, it’s assumed that the Salesforce Core, Omni routing, and telephony provider microservices don’t have an outage.

Telephony provider system has an outage

In this scenario, it’s assumed that the Salesforce Core, Omni routing, and Salesforce RealTime microservices don’t have an outage.

When there’s an outage of the telephony provider system, your business continuity depends on the disaster recovery options provided by your telephony provider.

You can choose either of these configurations from the options provided by your telephony provider.

• Active/Standby: In this configuration, an active contact center instance is plugged in with the telephony instance in one geographic region and a Standby contact center instance is maintained in another region.
• Active/Active: In this configuration, two active contact center instances are maintained in two different geographic regions.

For both of these configurations, you must make sure that:

• The alternate active or standby contact center has the same settings as the active contact center.
• The service quotas of the telephony provider are properly configured for the alternate active or standby contact center and the associated services in the disaster recovery geographic region.
• The user data such as call recordings are replicated between the active region and disaster recovery geographic region where an alternate active or standby contact center is set up.

When you set up two telephony instances or two contact centers in Salesforce for these disaster recovery configurations, you must follow the disaster recovery principles.

• Maintain the two contact centers instances in the same org.
• Maintain the alternate active or standby contact center with all the latest configurations such as users, queues, IVR flows, Omni flows, skills for routing, and queue membership.
• Set up the infrastructure and provision any service quota limits or configurations of the telephony provider instances required for the alternate active or standby contact centers.
• Validate any changes to the Salesforce artifacts or telephony provider’s artifacts for the active contact centers and copy these artifacts to the standby or alternate active contact centers.
• Salesforce artifacts that aren’t dependent on contact centers must not be duplicated for the alternate active or standby contact centers.

Use these disaster recovery principles to prepare your environment for any telephony provider system outage. During an outage, follow your telephony provider’s guidelines to switch telephony traffic from the active contact center to the alternate active or standby contact center.

After setting up alternate active or standby contact centers, make sure you manually or automatically sync the Salesforce and telephony provider configurations for the two contact center instances.

When the disaster recovery setup is done, during an outage you can:

• Remap the phone number to the alternate active or standby contact center instance by using the virtual numbers mapped to DID or a toll-free number provided by your telephony provider.
• Reassign reps to the alternate active or standby contact center instance by using Salesforce APIs. Update the call center field of all the rep's user records as the alternate active or standby contact center instance.

For any other outage scenario, you have limited disaster recovery options.

• Salesforce core, Omni capabilities, and telephony provider systems have an outage at the same time. In this scenario, you can ensure business continuity, if:
  • Your telephony provider offers a disaster recovery option to switch to an alternate active or standby contact center instance.
  • Salesforce core and Omni are hosted in a first-party data center.
• Salesforce Core and Salesforce real-time microservices have an outage at the same time. In this scenario, you can use only your telephony provider system’s disaster recovery options for business continuity.