Overview

We would like to make two things clear. First, we respect your privacy and take significant efforts to protect all your data. Second, we would never do anything with your data that we wouldn’t be proud to tell the world about.

Keeping our customers' data secure is the most important thing that Intercom does. We go to considerable lengths to ensure that all data sent to Intercom is handled securely - keeping Intercom secure is fundamental to our business.

As you continue to learn more about Intercom we recommend you also review our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Security Team

Our infrastructure and security team includes people who’ve played lead roles in designing, building, and operating highly secure Internet facing systems at companies ranging from startups to large public companies like Amazon and Facebook.

Best Practices

Incident Response Plan

  • We have implemented a formal procedure for security events and have educated all our staff on our policies.
  • When security events are detected they are escalated to our emergency alias, teams are paged, notified and assembled to rapidly address the event.
  • After a security event is fixed we write up a post-mortem analysis.
  • The analysis is reviewed in person, distributed across the company and includes action items that will make the detection and prevention of a similar event easier in the future.

Build Process Automation

  • We have functioning, frequently used automation in place so that we can safely and reliably rollout changes to both our application and operating platform within minutes.
  • We typically deploy code dozens of times a day, so we have high confidence that we can get a security fix out quickly when required.

Infrastructure

  • All of our services run in the cloud. Intercom does not run our own routers, load balancers, DNS servers, or physical servers.
  • The vast majority of our services and data are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the USA, and we are in the process of consolidating all services and data there. Intercom services have been built with disaster recovery in mind.
  • All of our infrastructure is spread across 3 AWS data centers (availability zones) and will continue to work should any one of those data centers fail unexpectedly.
  • All of our servers are within our own virtual private cloud (VPC) with network access control lists (ACL’s) that prevent unauthorized requests getting to our internal network.
  • Intercom uses MongoDB’s MMS backup solution for datastores that contain customer data.

Service Levels

We have uptime of 99.9% or higher. You can check our past month stats at https://status.intercom.io

Data

  • All customer data is stored in the USA.
  • Customer data is stored in multi-tenant datastores, we do not have individual datastores for each customer. However strict privacy controls exist in our application code to ensure data privacy and prevent one customer from accessing another customers data. We have many unit and integration tests in place to ensure these privacy controls work as expected. These tests are run every time our codebase is updated and even one single test failing will prevent new code being shipped to production.

Data Transfer

  • All data sent to or from Intercom is encrypted in transit using 256 bit encryption.
  • Our API and application endpoints are TLS/SSL only and score an "A+" rating on SSL Labs' tests. This means we only use strong cipher suites and have features such as HSTS and Perfect Forward Secrecy fully enabled.

Authentication

  • Intercom is served 100% over https. Intercom runs a zero-trust corporate network.
  • There are no corporate resources or additional privileges from being on Intercom’s network.
  • We have two-factor authentication (2FA) and strong password policies on GitHub, Google, AWS MongoDB and Intercom to ensure access to cloud services are protected.

Permissions and Admin Controls

  • Intercom enables permission levels to be set for any employees with access to Intercom.
  • Permissions and access can be set to include app settings, billing, user data, or the ability to send/edit manual messages and auto messages.

Application Monitoring

  • On an application level, we produce audit logs for all activity, ship logs to Logentries for analysis, and use S3/Glacier for archival purposes.
  • All access to Intercom applications is logged and audited.
  • Bastion hosts are used to login to devices.
  • All actions taken on production consoles or in the Intercom application are logged.

Security Audits

  • We bi-annually engage with well-regarded third-party auditors to audit our code-base, and work with them to resolve potential issues.
  • We use technologies such as Logentries, AWS Cloudtrail and Security Monkey to provide an audit trail over our infrastructure and the Intercom application. Auditing allows us to do ad-hoc security analysis, track changes made to our setup and audit access to every layer of our stack.

Compliance

  • Intercom, Inc. complies with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information from European Union member countries.
  • Intercom, Inc. complies with the U.S.- Swiss Safe Harbor framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use and retention of personal data from Switzerland.
  • Intercom, Inc. complies with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) published best practices

PCI Obligations

Intercom is not subject to PCI obligations. All payment instrument processing is outsourced to Stripe.