Introducing Business Critical Plan: Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance for Mission-Critical AI Applications
As AI applications move from prototypes to production, organizations face new challenges: stricter compliance requirements, higher availability demands, and the need to protect sensitive data without slowing innovation.
To meet these needs, we’re introducing the Business Critical Plan — the most advanced service tier in Zilliz Cloud, purpose-built for teams running mission-critical AI workloads that require uncompromising reliability, security, and compliance. This new plan builds upon the core strengths of Zilliz Cloud, offering multi-region availability, advanced disaster recovery, and enterprise-grade compliance, ensuring your AI systems remain resilient even under the most demanding conditions.
In this post, we’ll explore why the Business Critical Plan matters, the unique capabilities it unlocks, and how it fits within the broader Zilliz Cloud ecosystem for secure, large-scale AI deployment.
Why We Built the Business Critical Plan
Over the past year, we’ve collaborated closely with organizations across various industries, including healthcare, finance, and legal services, as well as other highly regulated sectors. Their feedback has been clear: while they value the convenience of managed vector search services, they also require stronger guarantees regarding data isolation, compliance controls, and uptime — without incurring the overhead of managing their own infrastructure.
Our existing Enterprise plan already provides enterprise-grade security and meets major compliance standards like SOC 2 Type II. But some customers operate in environments where regulatory and data-handling requirements go even further — demanding an additional layer of protection and control.
Zilliz Cloud BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) enables complete data sovereignty, allowing all data and compute to remain within their own VPC. However, not every team wants the added complexity and maintenance overhead that comes with self-managed environments.
The new Business Critical Plan fills this gap — delivering enterprise-grade assurance within a fully managed, ready-to-use SaaS experience. It combines the simplicity of Zilliz Cloud with advanced safeguards, dedicated resources, and premium SLAs designed for mission-critical AI workloads.
Core Capabilities of the Business Critical Plan
The Business Critical Plan is a new option within the Dedicated tier of Zilliz Cloud, joining Standard and Enterprise as our most advanced managed service for organizations with stringent compliance requirements and zero tolerance for downtime or data loss. It combines enhanced security controls, disaster recovery, and global deployment capabilities to support production-grade AI applications operating under the world’s toughest regulatory frameworks.
For enterprises building RAG pipelines, semantic search systems, or recommendation engines that process sensitive data — from protected health information (PHI) to personally identifiable information (PII) and financial records — the Business Critical Plan offers the infrastructure assurance and operational safeguards needed to deploy with confidence.
High-Level Availability and Disaster Recovery
The Business Critical Plan deploys clusters across multiple regions with built-in high availability and disaster recovery, ensuring your vector database stays online and protected even during regional outages. It includes:
Global Cluster Support: Deploy clusters worldwide to keep data close to users, improving performance and meeting local data-access requirements.
Multi-Region Replication: Maintain read replicas in secondary regions for high availability and rapid failover in the event of primary region unavailability. This ensures your AI applications remain operational even during regional infrastructure disruptions.
Automated Failover: Redirect traffic automatically to healthy replicas during outages, minimizing downtime without requiring manual intervention from your team.
Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR): Restore collections to any moment within the retention window to recover from corruption, deletion, or attacks.
Together, these features provide the reliability needed for mission-critical AI workloads that demand zero downtime and guaranteed data integrity.
Security & Compliance
For organizations operating in regulated industries, security and compliance are non-negotiable. The Business Critical Plan delivers the most advanced encryption, key management, and compliance capabilities available in Zilliz Cloud.
- Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK): Maintain full control over your encryption keys using your cloud provider’s KMS (AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud KMS). You can rotate, revoke, and audit key usage to meet data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. This multi-layered encryption approach provides true defense-in-depth beyond standard SaaS practices.
Full-Path In-Transit Encryption: All data is encrypted at every stage—TLS for client connections and internal encryption between all Zilliz Cloud microservices. This end-to-end protection prevents unauthorized access across the entire data flow.
HIPAA-Ready: Suitable for healthcare and other regulated environments with built-in safeguards for PHI. Includes Business Associate Agreement (BAA) support, audit logging, and administrative, physical, and technical controls to meet HIPAA requirements.
PCI DSS Compliance: Supports secure handling of payment data with adherence to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
With these capabilities, the Business Critical Plan provides enterprise-grade assurance that sensitive vector data remains protected, compliant, and under your control—no matter where it resides.
Priority Support & Response SLA
When running mission-critical applications, every minute of downtime matters. The Business Critical Plan includes enhanced support and response guarantees designed to keep your systems running smoothly:
Dedicated Priority Support: Direct access to senior support engineers with deep expertise in vector databases and enterprise-scale deployments.
Rapid Incident Response: Accelerated response-time SLAs to ensure critical issues are addressed immediately.
Proactive Monitoring: Continuous monitoring by the Zilliz Cloud team to detect and resolve potential issues before they impact your applications.
Emergency Ticket Handling: Highest-priority escalation for urgent incidents to minimize downtime.
This level of support ensures that your production AI workloads receive the attention, expertise, and responsiveness they demand.
Enterprise Integration
The Business Critical Plan supports seamless integration with enterprise identity systems, enabling secure and centralized user management through OIDC and LDAP authentication. These integrations provide enterprise-grade role-based access control (RBAC), ensuring that only authorized users can access your Zilliz Cloud resources in accordance with your organization’s security policies.
For a complete list of capabilities of the Business Critical plan, refer to this pricing page for more details.
Business Critical Plan vs. Enterprise Plan vs. BYOC
Zilliz Cloud offers a range of deployment options tailored to various stages of your AI journey and differing compliance requirements. Among these, the Business Critical Plan, Enterprise Plan, and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model all deliver advanced security and compliance, but with different levels of control and operational responsibility. Understanding their differences will help you select the most suitable model for your organization.
| Feature | Business Critical Plan | Enterprise Plan | BYOC |
| Compliance | HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, enhanced data privacy | SOC 2, standard security features | Determined by your organization’s cloud environment |
| Availability & Recovery | Global clusters, multi-region replication, automated failover, PITR, 99.99% uptime (If multi-replica enabled) | Single-region AZ level failover, elastic scaling, 99.95% uptime | Depends on your cloud configuration |
| Data Protection | Continuous backup, PITR, masking/tokenization, snapshots | Standard backups | Fully managed by your team |
| Encryption | CMEK, full-path in-transit encryption (edge + internal) | Standard encryption | Managed via your own KMS and policies |
| Support | Priority response SLA, emergency ticket handling | Enterprise support | Based on your internal or cloud provider SLAs |
| Pricing | Varies by use case(Please contact us for more details) | From $155 /month (see details) | Based on your cloud costs |
How to Choose the Right Option for Your Use Case
Different organizations adopt Zilliz Cloud at different stages of their AI maturity. While all three options—Business Critical, Enterprise, and BYOC—deliver high security, the best choice depends on your risk tolerance, operational model, and regulatory exposure.
Business Critical Plan — For organizations that can’t afford downtime or data risk
Choose the Business Critical Plan when your vector database underpins core business functions—for example, production RAG systems in healthcare, financial fraud detection, or global recommendation engines. These are workloads where an outage could mean lost revenue, SLA breaches, or compliance violations.
This plan provides multi-region resilience and built-in disaster recovery, eliminating the need for a dedicated infrastructure team. It’s particularly suitable for:
Healthcare, fintech, and insurance companies processing sensitive or regulated data
Enterprises operating across multiple continents that need regional data access
AI platforms where uptime and compliance are part of customer contracts
In short: choose Business Critical when business continuity and compliance outweigh cost.
Enterprise Plan — For mature teams scaling production AI
The Enterprise Plan is suitable for companies that have moved beyond prototypes but don’t yet require multi-region redundancy. It’s a great balance of reliability and cost for teams running regional production systems, such as internal search tools, customer support copilots, or analytics assistants.
It covers standard enterprise security needs—SSO, MFA, SOC 2—and delivers consistent uptime with automated scaling. Typical users include:
Single-region (3-AZ) deployment — resilient to AZ-level failures within the single region
Enterprises needing predictable costs with strong SLAs
Teams where compliance is important but not industry-mandated
In short: choose Enterprise when you want production-grade performance without global complexity.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) — For maximum control and data sovereignty
Choose BYOC when your organization has strict internal or contractual requirements regarding where data resides. With BYOC, Zilliz Cloud runs inside your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account—your cloud, your VPC, your policies.
This option is ideal for large enterprises or public-sector organizations with dedicated DevOps teams that must meet custom compliance, cloud spend optimization, or data residency requirements. It’s commonly adopted by:
Banks, government agencies, and multinational enterprises with sovereign cloud mandates
Organizations that want Zilliz Cloud’s management experience without giving up infrastructure control
In short: choose BYOC when data governance and visibility matter more than managed simplicity.
Zilliz Cloud Offerings at a Glance
While the Business Critical, Enterprise, and BYOC plans serve advanced and regulated workloads, Zilliz Cloud also offers flexible options for teams earlier in their AI journey. All plans share the same high-performance architecture and developer experience.
Free Plan – Ideal for developers experimenting with personal RAG or vector search projects. Includes 5 GB of storage, 2.5 million vCUs per month, and up to 5 collections.
Standard Plan – Designed for prototypes and non-critical workloads that need consistent performance at a predictable cost.
Enterprise Plan – Delivers enterprise-grade reliability, security, and SLAs for production AI workloads running in a single region.
Business Critical Plan – Adds multi-region resilience and compliance for regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
BYOC– Deploys Zilliz Cloud inside your own cloud account for complete data sovereignty and control.
For more details, see the Zilliz Cloud service plan comparison.
Getting Started with Business Critical Plan
The Business Critical Plan represents our commitment to serving the most demanding enterprise use cases while maintaining the developer-friendly experience Zilliz Cloud is known for. Whether you're building AI-powered diagnostic tools for healthcare, fraud detection systems for financial services, intelligent search for legal document repositories, or global recommendation engines serving millions of users across continents, the Business Critical Plan provides the foundation you need to deploy with confidence.
If you're interested in exploring whether the Business Critical Plan fits your organization's needs, contact our sales team to discuss your compliance and deployment requirements.
For more technical details on plan features and capabilities, visit our pricing page or explore the Zilliz Cloud documentation.
Ready to build production AI applications with enterprise-grade infrastructure? Start your journey with Zilliz Cloud today and get $100 in credits to experience the world's leading managed vector database.
Fendy FengFendy Feng is the Product Marketing Manager at Zilliz. She has extensive experience developing and enhancing the impact of open-source projects in various global markets by producing high-quality, tailored content. Before joining Zilliz, Fendy worked as a Content Strategist at PingCAP, a fast-growing E-Series startup renowned for its open-source distributed SQL database.
- Why We Built the Business Critical Plan
- Core Capabilities of the Business Critical Plan
- Business Critical Plan vs. Enterprise Plan vs. BYOC
- Zilliz Cloud Offerings at a Glance
- Getting Started with Business Critical Plan
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