How to submit?

Jira Outage: The Best Way to Eliminate Its Impact

jira manage work flow

Jira is one of the leading management tools released by Atlassian. It greatly boosts DevOps cooperation for a fast and accurate product development process and enables the daily workflow easier. Seeing the importance of this management tool, one can ask a question: “What will happen to our data if Atlassian experiences an outage?”

Though, not will, but has already had. Let’s mention the latest and probably one of the most devastating outages in IT history – the Atlassian outage in April when Jira and Confluence users couldn’t access their accounts for almost a fortnight. It was definitely a tough and uncertain time for Atlassian customers who saw the same note from the Atlassian support team each time they checked on Jira Software Status: ”We continue to work on the defined processes to the resolution of the issues impacting some customers.”

Jira outage impacts on Atlassian customers

The numbers say themselves – 775 users were affected by the Jira outage and almost half of them  – about 40% faced the impossibility to restore their data. What does it mean for a company and its team? Great loss. And here should be mentioned not only budget loss but also the loss of reputation, nerves and team’s spirit.

Meanwhile, some companies were experiencing tough times, some companies managed to continue their work uninterruptedly. How was it possible?  The answer hides in the fulfillment of the “so-called” Shared Responsibility Model.

Shared Responsibility Model and each party’s obligations 

Every cloud service provider operates in accordance with the Shared Responsibility Model and Atlassian is not an exception. Thus, the provider takes care of all the risks and vulnerabilities occurring to the platform, and if there are some to appear, its responsibility is to inform its users about such “troubles”. Atlassian can also restore the entire platform with all its accounts if there is a necessity like what happened in April during the massive Jira outage. However, it can’t restore data from a single account because it is not the provider’s obligation. And it can last a while… fortnight – to remind.

So, who is responsible for data on customers’ accounts? Users themselves. So to say, in the case of the Jira account outage, the customer is the only person who has to deal with the consequences of losing access to the data.

There are a number of reasons that lead to outages, including human errors or ransomware. The results of human mistakes are possible to imagine: the latest Atlassian outages happened exactly because of it – the lack of communication between technical teams, different protocols, and the massive outage as a consequence. When it comes to ransomware – it is possible to call it the “cancer” of the IT industry nowadays. Just imagine every 11 seconds somebody suffers from some hostile or malevolent actor who encrypts, deletes, or modifies the enterprise’s vital information and then waits for a ransom.

Is it possible for a company to avoid unpleasant situations like that and reduce its responsibilities according to the Shared Responsibility Model? Definitely… yes!

Backup as a comprehensive tool for Jira recoverability

A third-party Jira backup software, like GitProtect.io, can become this “magic problem solver” in any event of failure. It will definitely enforce your data recoverability and accessibility as well as help you fulfill your Shared Responsibility Model.

Compliance with Security Standards

Moreover, with comprehensive backup software in place you can meet your legal requirements and security standards, like SOC 2 or ISO27K. Why is it so important? Because compliance with high-security standards opens a wider range of possibilities for any success-oriented enterprise; it shows how reliable and secure the company is. And actually, DevOps backup is a required element in the certification process.

Automation and monitoring

What really persuades every company to choose a backup solution is backup automation and ease of monitoring. Just imagine the situation: your DevOps team needs to write scripts to manually perform backups every day and check those backups for recoverability; how much time will they waste? A lot. It may seem cost-effective in the beginning only. Though, in a long-term perspective, every leader will notice the time ineffectiveness his developers have to deal with.

Another example is a solution with automated backups. In this situation, the DevOps team needs just to monitor backup performance. Moreover, they can get all the information via email or Slack notifications, which greatly reduces the time they spend on backups and they can fully concentrate on building the code for enterprise prosperity.

Comprehensive Jira backup 

Another important aspect is the data the backup covers. It is crucial for your backup solution to back up your entire Jira environment (all Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Jira Service Service Management), including projects, issues, roles, users, workflows, comments, attachments, audit logs, etc. Thus, in case of an “unpleasant” event, you will be able to recover your entire Jira account with all the data and your team will be able to continue fulfilling their tasks without even noticing that the problem has occurred.

A backup copy should leave the choice

If you want to build a reliable backup that is easily recoverable and brings you peace of mind, then it’s worth paying attention to the possibility to create full, incremental, and differential backups. It will enable your team an assurance that all the data is recoverable from any point in time and there should be no worries about storage overload.

Benefits of multi-storage

Nowadays the ideal backup is the one that follows the “golden” backup standard – 3-2-1 rule. Under this model, you have at least 3 copies, in 2 different storages, one of which is offsite. Why 2 different storages? Because if one is compromised and you can’t recover the data from it, you always have another one. Thus, having a multi-storage opportunity makes sense – it increases your withstand to any event of failure.

Here, it’s worth mentioning replication. The possibility to replicate data to different storages without performing different backup plans enhances your Jira data recoverability.

Restore destinations – plan Jira Disaster Recovery

When an outage takes place, it’s obvious that an enterprise wants to recover its data as fast as possible. They may want to recover their critical data to the same or a new account. This is even to a free Jira account with no user-recovery option. You should be able to easily restore all your Jira data between different Jira accounts – both SaaS and self-hosted services. Also, such Jira backup software should enable you to restore your data from any point in time. Additionally, it should perform a test restore to better plan your Jira Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan.

Conclusion

Considering all the mentioned must-have features, we can conclude that a third-party backup solution can help an enterprise solve multiple problems by enforcing its responsibilities and automating backups, enabling daily monitoring and instantly recovering the Jira data.

Thus, it permits the customers to reduce the risks and boost productivity as there will be no need to stop the developing process during the outage. Third-party backup software, like GitProtect.io, will accommodate its users with a comprehensive Jira Disaster Recovery solution.

It will permit them to perform instant recovery of their data from a definite point in time. This abolishes all the nasty consequences, including data and budget loss. Thus, making DevOps backup a game that is worth the candle!

Vote on recent startup submissions:

More Stories