How to back up your Jira Asset data before catastrophe strikes

If you are going to back-up anything in Jira, make sure that its your assets, Back them before you lose all of your assets

The Scenario

A catastrophic outage has plunged the company's internal servers into darkness, rendering critical applications inaccessible to both employees and customers. The widespread disruption has left everyone scrambling to assess the damage, with no clear picture of which applications are affected or who is bearing the brunt of the crisis. As troubleshooting efforts stall, a sense of chaos engulfs the organization, bringing employee productivity to a grinding halt and leaving customers stranded in frustration.

A major system outage can be a nightmare for any IT professional, but it can be avoided with the help of a configuration management database (CMDB) or Assets as known in Atlassian's Jira Service Management (JSM). JSM Assets provides a single system of record and digital blueprint for IT infrastructure and beyond, helping businesses avoid outages, reduce recovery time, maintain compliance, understand the impact of changes, and more.

In this example, we discussed IT assets, but a CMDB can track any type of asset, from vehicles and buildings to patents.

The JSM Assets database stores information about all of the assets in an organization, including their configuration, dependencies, and relationships. This information can be used to troubleshoot problems, plan changes, and ensure that systems are compliant with regulations.

What's the impact of lost or corrupted Asset / CMDB data? 

While the benefits of a JSM Assets / CMDB are many, its value is contingent on having accurate and available data at all times. JSM Assets can only be helpful if it contains high-quality, accurate, maintained information. When data in the Assets database (i.e. configuration items) is lost or corrupted, the risk of business disruption grows significantly, and the ability to diagnose outages, understand the impact of decisions and actions, manage assets, and maintain compliance are severely weakened. In fact, having inaccurate or incomplete data in the database can cause even bigger problems if businesses aren’t careful.

Having an Assets database that contains “dirty” data can create confusion, waste effort, and lose time when a major incident occurs. Further complicating the issue is that data can sometimes be lost or corrupted days or even weeks before anyone even notices. Over that period of time, business decisions and changes to IT environments may only add to the mess, especially if IT teams are unable to examine historical data to trace all of the changes and identify how and when their data loss or corruption occurred.

This is the nightmare scenario that keeps IT leaders and JSM platform owners up at night.

‍Below is a quote from a Atlassian JSM customer in the media industry whose Asset database was accidentally corrupted. It took this customer over a week to recover, which led to further data loss and affected their ability to view how service incidents impacted their business.

“Two months ago an accident led to the corruption of our JSM Assets database. It took us a week to identify the corrupted records and rebuild the Assets database. During this process we had further data loss.  We also couldn’t address service incidents properly which impacted our visibility into how they were impacting infrastructure and business as a whole” - JSM Platform Owner, Media Company

You can see now why an accurate JSM Assets database is so important to an IT organization and why it’s a high priority to protect the data in the Assets database.

But how do you do it?

‍Protect JSM Assets Data (and other Atlassian Jira Data) with Revyz 

Protecting your JSM platform data is essential to avoiding business disruption and minimizing risk, whether it’s related to IT incidents, employee requests, customer cases, or configuration items in your Assets database. However, did you know it’s your responsibility (as a customer) to protect your Atlassian Jira cloud data?

Revyz Assets Data Manager and the Revyz Data manager for Jira help companies increase JSM Assets data resilience and accuracy with automated backups and rapid, stress-free recovery. With Revyz, Atlassian JSM customers can now back up their critical JSM Assets data with more control, restore lost or corrupted data with speed and ease, and mitigate risk with flexible backup retention policies.

To learn more about Revyz, check out our ebook, "The Ultimate Guide to: Jira Data Protection.”