Backups and Business Continuity

We provide a high level of cross-regional business continuity to be able to support the worst of disasters.

Backups are cloned over secure links to remote archives. These run daily for non-data-store systems, with data-store systems supporting journals and logs and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours. Overall Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 24 hours. Daily backups are retained for seven days, and a weekly backup is retained beyond that for a total period of 90 days.

Maintenance Windows

In most cases, maintenance has limited or no negative impact on the availability and functionality of Lumen’s services.

We intend to provide at least five days' notice in advance of any planned maintenance windows that may impact system availability. However, we may perform emergency unscheduled maintenance at any time. If we expect emergency unscheduled maintenance to negatively affect the availability or functionality of the Application Services, we will do our best to provide advance notice.
Any outage which happens within these defined maintenance windows is not considered a service outage.

Changes are made in a continuous manner, with automated testing and validation. There is also a standard change window.

Default Maintenance Windows

We have the following maintenance window types:

1. Continuous Changes

Those changes where stable automated testing and deployment processes manage the commits, including platform critical updates as well as configuration and code deployments. No notification is sent when these changes are committed. Lumen uses a Continuous Change Delivery model where changes are delivered through staging to production as soon as they are tested and validated to cause no impact.

2. Planned Changes

Any other change which cannot be made within a Continuous Change. These should always come with at least five business days of notification and coordination.

3. Emergency Changes

Those made with less than five business days' notice, and should only be used in the most extreme of situations (such as zero-day vulnerabilities).

Service Availability 

We use commercially reasonable efforts to make Lumen Services available during Planned Service Periods, which exclude planned maintenance windows or other scheduled maintenance outages. Our availability target is at least: 99.9%.