Courtesy - Valiantys
Jira Backup Use Cases | Real World Stories | Revyz.io
Atlassian’s Jira software is a comprehensive and customizable solution for a variety of teams, given the varied use cases that Jira can help with in your business, unfortunately, it’s not really possible to fully experience any technology solution in a blog like this, so this blog post provides the next best thing you can experience, real-world customer success stories addressing different use cases for Jira Backup in three different industries.
Travel: Automating Data Backup & Recovery To Bring in Efficiencies in the Team
A leader in active travel, this company has been taking people on unforgettable biking, walking & hiking and multi-adventure trips around the world. The thoughtful, meticulous trip design has set this business apart from others. This company has a very distributed workforce operating out of multiple locations throughout the world. Its IT team has broad responsibilities, from customer support to telecommunications, data storage, and application support. Though the company uses a hybrid IT infrastructure, it sought to accelerate cloud projects. A year ago it began its cloud journey with Atlassian by moving all its Atlassian applications to the cloud including Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence. Jira is a business critical application for this company, the planning and execution teams use Jira for creating and tracking detailed tasks for each team member and also use Jira to capture critical guest preferences and related information as part of the planning and execution of the trip. The data stored in the Jira application is absolutely critical for the success of this business. Within the Jira application when any data is deleted be it Jira issues, attachments, comments and or configuration, those data objects are irrecoverably lost instantaneously. Any such data loss, accidental or otherwise poses a significant risk to its business.
Atlassian, like many other leading SaaS vendors operates a shared responsibility model for its suite of applications including Jira, meaning Atlassian is responsible for protecting the platform, while its customers are responsible for protecting the data they add in within the application. Without secure backups in place, this business risked data loss due to accidental deletion, platform disruption, and security considerations such as insider threats and a variety of sophisticated external threats such as account takeovers.
One of the IT team members was tasked with taking regular backups of Jira data, in order to complete his task the IT engineers tried to put a script in place to automate the data backup process using private API’s which would automatically create an XML backup file, but unfortunately the challenge for him was that his dataset was too large for the backup to complete, he would frequently run into challenges with downloading the large file, he was able to complete his task 1 in 10 times the backup operation was initiated. This led to the IT team searching for an alternative given the criticality of the data residing with Jira.
The Atlassian admin for this business found Revyz’s Jira Backup & Restore solution in the Atlassian marketplace and was ecstatic about it, after gaining the necessary internal approvals, he was able to install the app with a few clicks. The same week they started the free trial, a new administrator accidentally deleted a number of Jira issues, which included critical customer related attachments and information. Having the Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira Software literally saved the day for this business as they were able to recover back this critical data with a couple of clicks. The whole backup process was now automated, it did not require an engineer to babysit the scripts or worry about managing the back data. The data was backed-up every day automatically instead of whenever the scripts decided to work.
The benefits of the Revyz solution include:
- Improved productivity enabled through automation and fast data recovery
- Extended cloud-native data protection, governance, and recovery for Jira
- 20% reduction in labor costs through automation of tedious and repetitive tasks, and 15% overall operational savings due to elimination of costs associated with maintaining the XML data backups
Enterprise Technology: eDiscovery
Another case is that of a leading supplier of Enterprise technology solutions that was rapidly expanding into multiple markets in the world simultaneously. The tool chain they had in place included Salesforce and Atlassian Jira as part of their order management and fulfillment processes. They were initially using the on-premises Data Center version of Jira, wherein their standard practice was to backup all the data in their Jira Data Center application on a 24 hour cycle, they were using on-premises database backup solution from Commvault to help protect their critical order data. Over the course of the 2020 & 2021 the IT team managing the Jira application were tasked by their legal team multiple times to retrieve back deleted Jira objects including issues, attachments and comments to address ongoing disputes and lawsuits. This task for each such a request entailed:
- Spinning up separate instance of the Jira application to be able to load the data from the backup so as to not affect your production systems
- Searching for what was deleted
- Repeating the above across different data backup snapshots till they found what they were looking for
This task took efforts of multiple IT engineers spread across weeks to retrieve the requisite information.
In 2021, they decided to migrate their Atlassian applications to the cloud and thus this challenge of retrieving data back data to address the eDiscovery needs of the legal team became more acute.
In deploying the Revyz backup & restore solution the IT team managing the Jira cloud application were able to streamline and bring in costs savings in the following areas:
- Eliminated the need for making manual XML based backups
- Saved on man hours to make backups
- Saved on additional storage needed to store the data on-premises
- Eliminated the need for additional hardware to restore the data to search for what was needed by the Legal team
- Saved on the time to search across multiple snapshots of data to be able to address the needs of the legal team - What used to take days & weeks was now being done in minutes
Financial Services: SOC2 Compliance
Changes to production systems are often the root cause of system instability problems. To mitigate this risk, a leading Financial Services company embraced a change management process as part of its SOC 2 compliance, these processes are documented in the configuration and change management policy. Their change management processes are built around the Jira and Jira boards, nothing makes it through the Jira board without getting the eyes of the full security and compliance team, and discussed on a daily basis. Also, almost all of their infrastructure is managed as code, so they rely on a standard code review process for approving changes. They only allow for break-glass (emergency) changes to bypass this process if they are reviewed retrospectively.
The change management data is extremely critical for the company to not only from an audit ability perspective of the changes made, but also to maintain its SOC2 compliance. As part of its process to ensure that all change management data is available to the auditor at all times this company implemented Revyz’s automated backup and restore solution to eliminate any risk posed to its change management data from accidental deletion of Jira data or from malicious internal or external deletions. Thus providing assurance to not only to themselves but also to the SOC2 auditors who were auditing the company for its SOC2 re-attestation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the benefits of the Revyz solution include:
- Automated and secure Jira data backups and restores
- Elimination of manual labor costs associated with traditional backup methods
- Instantaneous recovery of Jira data
- Reduced time to fulfill eDiscovery requests, with data searchable within minutes
How can Revyz Help
Implementing a data protection strategy for Atlassian Jira cloud has become a necessity and equally complex. With limited native options from Atlassian, you will have to either build some custom scripts, manage data on your own to address your data protection needs or you leverage 3rd party SaaS applications such as Revyz to offload data protection from your core IT team.
Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira can store data securely & remotely, making it available for various recovery scenarios without having you to rollback the entire site.
Try Revyz for free - Atlassian marketplace link. Share your feedback on how we can improve & what other use cases you would want Revyz to address.
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SaaS Backup: An Antidote to Ransomware
Data Backup - A Key Pillar of Insider Risk Management
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A Guide to SaaS Shared Responsibility Model
Why you need a SaaS backup strategy and solution
Why we built Revyz
