Enhanced Business Continuity for Appian Cloud

This page applies to Appian Cloud only. It may not reflect the differences with Appian Government Cloud.

Enhanced Business Continuity is available for purchase only to customers that are on Advanced or Enterprise Support and their environment is located in a USA commercial region. This feature needs to be purchased separately to Advanced or Enterprise Support.

Overview

When Enhanced Business Continuity is enabled, Appian stores backups of your Appian Cloud production environment in a secondary geographical region, within the USA, for disaster recovery purposes. This feature is in addition to the standard Appian Cloud backup policy.

With this feature you have a guaranteed recovery point objective (RPO) in the event of a region-wide failure where your environment is located. In such an event, the environment will be restored using backups in the secondary region.

For example, if your environment is located in Northern Virginia you can choose to store additional backups in the Ohio region or vice versa.

Service Level Agreements

When Enhanced Business Continuity is enabled, you have a guaranteed recovery point objective (RPO) of 4 hours in the event of a region-wide failure where your environment is located.

Prerequisites

  • Your environment must be located in a USA commercial region.
  • You must have purchased Advanced or Enterprise Support.
  • You must have a purchase order for Enhanced Business Continuity. Note this feature needs to be purchased separately to Advanced or Enterprise Support.
  • Your Appian Cloud environment must not use Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) with AWS KMS since BYOK with KMS depends on region-specific resources hosted in the same region as your environment.

    Appian supports BYOK with AWS CloudHSM with Enhanced Business Continuity. However, you are responsible for providing a backup of the HSM located in another region. The HSM backup must be available in the event of a region-wide failure where your environment is located.

Available Regions

Your environment must be located in a USA commercial region. The backups will be stored in a secondary USA commercial region which is different from the region where the environment is located. These regions include:

  • Northern Virginia
  • Ohio
  • Oregon

For improved recovery time in the event of your environment being restored in a secondary geographical region, it is recommended that your environment is located in one of the following regions:

  • Ohio
  • Oregon
  • Northern California

For a full view of all Appian Cloud regions and other information please visit the Appian Trust Center.

Steps

Once the prerequisites have been completed, follow these steps to enable Enhanced Business Continuity for your Appian Cloud environment:

  1. Work with Appian Support via a Support case to enable this configuration in your Appian Cloud environment.
  2. Provide the preferred secondary backup region to Appian Support via the Support case.
  3. Appian Support will enable Enhanced Business Continuity for your production environment.

Recovery Procedure

In the event of a region-wide failure where your environment is located, Appian Support will restore the environment in the secondary region where the backups are located.

When an environment is restored in the secondary region, integration points between the environment and any resources or services external to Appian Cloud will need to be updated if the integrations use region-specific resources. Integration points which use region-specific resources include:

Appian Support will work with you to update the configurations for any integration points that are affected.

FAQ

Why is Enhanced Business Continuity only available in USA commercial regions?

Currently the USA is the only country with multiple Appian Cloud regions available, therefore it is the only location where backups to a secondary region are possible, while ensuring your data remains in the same country.

What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for Enhanced Business Continuity?

Currently there is no guaranteed RTO for this feature.

Does Enhanced Business Continuity cover all the of my Appian Cloud environments?

This feature is available for purchase on a per-environment basis.

What is the difference between High Availability (HA) and Enhanced Business Continuity?

Appian Cloud HA reduces the risk of an unplanned outage due to a hardware failure or due to an incident affecting an entire AWS availability zone, however all data is still stored in the same geographical region. Enhanced Business Continuity stores additional backups in a secondary region, reducing the risk of business disruption due to a region-wide failure.

Open in Github Built: Tue, May 23, 2023 (06:12:33 PM)

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