Security & Privacy Company News

Coming April 18: Control Your Zoom Data Routing

Beginning April 18, paid Zoom customers can opt in or out of a specific data center region, giving them more control over their data.

3 min read

Updated on March 17, 2021

Published on April 13, 2020

In this blog

01 What’s new - Jumplink to What’s new
02 Additional details - Jumplink to Additional details
03 Learn more in Eric’s weekly webinar - Jumplink to Learn more in Eric’s weekly webinar

Brendan Ittelson

Chief Ecosystem Officer

Brendan Ittelson is the Chief Ecosystem Officer leading Zoom’s developer ecosystem. Brendan joined Zoom in 2015 and led Zoom’s global customer support before taking the CTO role in 2020. Prior to Zoom, Brendan worked as both a contractor and a Department of Defense civilian employee in the federal sector, creating, implementing, and supporting various global identity management systems. After leaving the DoD, Brendan transitioned to the financial sector and joined a FinTech startup, Dynamics Inc, where he served as VP of Special Operations. In that role, he combined his business and technology background on special projects, including helping to revolutionize payments without disrupting the way payment systems work. Brendan holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Oregon and a certificate in Identity Management from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Zoom leverages a robust global network to support our users no matter where they are located, natively routing traffic through the meeting zone that will provide you the best performance. Now, paid Zoom customers will be able to customize which data center regions their account can use for its real-time meeting traffic.

Beginning April 18, every paid Zoom Meeting and Webinar customer can opt in or out of a specific data center region. This will determine the meeting servers and Zoom connectors that can be used to connect to Zoom meetings or webinars you are hosting and ensure the best-quality service.

Starting April 18, with respect to data in transit, Zoom admins and account owners of paid accounts can, at the account, group, or user level:
- Opt out of specific data center regions for data in transit
- Opt in to specific data center regions for data in transit Data in transit, or data in motion, is data actively moving from one location to another such as across the internet or through a private network. Data at rest is data that is not actively moving from device to device or network to network such as data stored in a cloud data center.
You will not be able to change or opt out of your default region, which will be locked. The default region is the region where a customer’s account is provisioned. For the majority of our customers, this is the United States.

This feature gives our customers more control over their data and their interaction with our global network when using Zoom’s industry-leading video communication services.

Zoom provides services out of our own Zoom-managed colocation centers, as well as a robust public cloud architecture. The regional selection will be honored regardless of which underlying resource is leveraged for the meeting.
Zoom Conference Room Connectors (CRCs) in disabled regions will not be allowed to connect to meetings or webinars.
Regional dial-in numbers for meetings are disabled when a region is disabled.
Currently, our data centers are grouped into these regions: the United States, Canada, Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America, and Japan/Hong Kong SAR.
Free users will be locked to data centers within their default region where their account is provisioned. For the majority of our free users, this is the United States. Data of free accounts outside of China will not be routed through China for meetings hosted by those accounts.
For users based in China, if your account admin has not opted into the China data center by April 25, your account will not be able to connect to our mainland China data center for data transit.
As a reminder, meeting servers in China have always been geofenced with the goal of ensuring that meeting data of users outside of China, stays outside of China. On April 3, we removed all of our HTTPS tunneling servers in China to address concerns regarding inadvertent connection through China.

Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan will be talking more about this security feature in his weekly “Ask Eric Anything” webinar at 11:30 a.m. PT April 15. You can register here:

Register for the webinar

Update May 12, 2020: We have adjusted Hong Kong’s designation to “Hong Kong SAR” in this blog post to align with the naming convention adopted by many of our tech industry peers. Editors note: This post was updated Nov. 6, 2020, to clarify language around customizing your data routing settings. 3/17/21: This blog was updated with minor word usage changes for clarity/specificity.