7 Reasons Why A Jira Backup & Restore Solution Is A Must Have
Overview
As more organizations move to Atlassian Cloud, protecting Jira data has become a critical part of business continuity and cybersecurity. While Atlassian is responsible for maintaining the availability and security of its cloud platform, customers remain responsible for protecting their own business data under the Shared Responsibility Model.
This article explains the seven most common reasons organizations lose Jira data and why implementing a dedicated Jira backup and restore solution is essential for long-term data resilience.
What Is a Jira Backup and Why Is It Important?
A Jira backup creates a separate, recoverable copy of your Jira data that can be restored in the event of accidental deletion, configuration errors, security incidents, or compliance requirements. Unlike native recovery features, a dedicated backup solution provides greater control over data retention and restoration.
Organizations continue to choose Atlassian's Jira for ease of collaboration in the cloud. Today, Atlassian's has over 249,173 customers worldwide and is growing. The end of sale announcement of Jira server in April of 2021 has further accelerated the adoption of Atlassian’s cloud offerings. In just this past quarter Atlassian added in 6,550 additional customers, making it crucial for businesses to implement reliable backup Jira cloud solutions for their cloud data protection needs.
The Jira name comes from the second and third syllables of the Japanese word pronounced as Gojira, which is Japanese for Godzilla. The name originated from a nickname Atlassian developers used to refer to Bugzilla, which was previously used internally for bug-tracking. Jira over the course of time has grown into a family of products designed to help teams of all types manage work. Originally, Jira was designed as a bug and issue tracker. But today, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool for all kinds of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development.
With this broad adoption of Jira across many industries and use cases, you must be wondering, “doesn’t Atlassian take care of Jira backup?”
It’s important to remember that Software as a Service (SaaS) platform providers, like Atlassian, take on the responsibility of application uptime and the underlying infrastructure. However, it’s still the customer’s responsibility to manage and protect their vital business data, according to Atlassian’s Shared Responsibility Model. It’s also worth noting that while some of the built-in features within Atlassian's Jira can feel like backups, none of them adhere to the common definition of a backup, which is a separate copy of data that’s stored in a separate location that data can quickly and easily be recovered from.
At Revyz, we've identified seven of the most common causes of Jira data loss.
1 Accidental deletion
This is actually the most common cause of data loss in Atlassian's Jira. If you delete a Jira issue / ticket as a user or an admin, whether you meant to or not, that deletion is instantaneous and that piece of data is lost forever, including any attachments, comments that issue / ticket had with it. In addition there is no audit log as to who initiated that change.
2 Bulk changes
Administrators and users sometimes make changes en masse, unfortunately there's no rollback for changes done in such a manner. Once the change is in effect, understanding which of these issues / tickets that need to be rolled back can be extremely complicated and time consuming. A backup can easily restore data. Your best bet would be to bulk-edit them again to previous value.
3 Configuration changes
Jira is a powerful issue tracking tool, which is highly customizable, some of the customizations are shared across projects, meaning a configuration change can impact multiple projects with unintended consequences. A backup of configuration is critical to quickly revert back changes so as to not impact productivity among users.
4 Internal security threats
When we think of threats to our business, we usually think in terms of protecting against external forces. However, many businesses also experience threats from the inside, and these issues happen more often than you think, more so in the challenging economic environment we currently live in. Having a high-grade recovery solution mitigates the risk of critical data being lost or destroyed.
5 External security threats
Ransomware and account takeovers are becoming more and more sophisticated, and criminals are finding more ways to reach our users and deceive them into clicking a link that encrypts the entire organization’s data for ransom or getting access to administrators credentials and causing havoc by deleting data, with a singular goal of extracting money out of the victim. A backup can easily restore data to an instance before the attack.
6 Retention policy gaps and confusion
Retention policies in Atlassian's Jira are designed to help organizations comply with regulations, laws and internal policies that require that they retain or delete content; they are not backups. But even if you do rely on your Jira project retention policy all the data objects are not covered by it and of course important objects such as issues / tickets do not adhere to that policy. A backup provides longer and more accessible retention that’s all protected and stored in one place for easy recovery.
7 Legal and compliance requirements
Some use cases for how Jira is used require that data residing in the application is auditable and all changes can be tracked for any legal / eDiscovery needs. A third-party backup solution is purpose-built to easily search within a backup and quickly bring back data to meet any regulatory compliance needs.
With Revyz’s Backup & Restore solution for Jira, customers can focus on their core business while knowing that their critical data assets within Jira cloud are fully protected against the six reasons we covered above.
Conclusion:
With Revyz’s Backup & Restore solution for Jira, customers can focus on their core business while knowing that their critical data assets within Jira cloud are fully protected against the six reasons we covered above.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Does Atlassian automatically back up Jira data?
Atlassian protects its cloud infrastructure, but customers are responsible for protecting and recovering their own business data under the Shared Responsibility Model.
2. What are the most common causes of Jira data loss?
The most common causes include accidental deletion, bulk updates, configuration errors, insider threats, ransomware, retention policy limitations, and compliance-related recovery requirements.
3. Are Jira retention policies the same as backups?
No. Retention policies manage how long data is kept but do not create independent recoverable copies of your data.
4. Why should organizations use a dedicated Jira backup solution?
Dedicated backup solutions provide secure, recoverable copies of Jira data, enabling faster recovery, improved compliance, stronger business continuity, and protection against accidental or malicious data loss.
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