Jira Cloud is a powerful tool used today by tens of thousands of enterprises for IT service management, help desks, product development, and project management, among other use cases. Jira is a very flexible tool that can be customized to meet the specific needs of any team or organization and can be used to improve efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. Some of the industries that rely on Jira cloud include regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Retail, among others.
Given the business criticality of the data stored in Jira cloud, it is important for enterprises to protect their Jira data from data loss scenarios, as outlined in the table below.
Atlassian, like other large and well-respected SaaS vendors such as Microsoft and Salesforce, among others, relies on the Shared Responsibility model for data protection. Wherein the customer is responsible for protecting their own data that is residing within Jira. While Atlassian, as part of its SaaS service, has a very robust mechanism for protecting the data in its platform at an infrastructure level across all of its customers, it does not help customers recover specific data at the customer account level. This would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. As Atlassian clearly sets the expectation in its documentation on what the customers should expect - "We do not use these backups to revert customer-initiated destructive changes, such as fields overwritten using scripts, or deleted issues, projects, or sites. To avoid data loss, we recommend making regular backups"
The options you have as a customer using Jira cloud for protecting your Jira data are as follows:
In this blog post, we will be comparing the top two options.
Jira Backup Manager is the native backup solution for Jira, which allows manual exports of the underlying database. In using this mechanism to protect your data, one would have to remember to backup your data every so often and also manage the data backups. Here are the steps involved in creating a backup.
Under Settings → System → Backup Manager
https://[YOUR SITE].atlassian.net/secure/admin/CloudExport.jspa
There are a couple of things to consider as part of your Jira backup strategy:
The whole purpose of creating a backup is to ensure you can restore the data back in the case of any accidental data loss. Let's now review the steps that need to be taken to get the data back into your Jira site.
Here are the steps involved in restoring data back from a backup file.
Under Settings → System → Import Jira Cloud
https://[YOUR SITE].atlassian.net/secure/admin/CloudImport!start.jspa?source=CLOUD
Before you begin restoring your Jira backup data, let's review the steps that Atlassian recommends.
Knowing how much data is in your backups is extremely critical, as that will determine how you proceed, i.e. do you need to engage Atlassian support, or can you do it yourself. When you do a database import back into your production site, all existing data will be overwritten, so be very careful when you do that, as you will lose all the data that was added /modified between the date/time when you took the backup to when you are able to re-import the data back into a Jira site. While your intent may have been to recover back critical data from the backup that you lost, a full restore may not lead to the intended outcome.
For a detailed list of capabilities, reference our documentation here - https://support.revyz.io/revyz-data-manager/revyz-data-manager-for-jira-capabilities
Once the app is installed in your Jira site, your automated daily backups start immediately. No coding or scripts are needed. In just one click, you can initiate unlimited backups anytime you need through Revyz's Jira native user interface.
Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest utilizing industry standard protocols (TLS 1.2 and AES-256). Revyz is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. More information is available on Revyz's Trust site here - https://trust.revyz.io
Customer service support is available seven days a week via the Revyz support desk, and a Zoom session is just a click away!
Implementing a data management 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 leverage 3rd party SaaS applications such as The Revyz Data Manager for Jira to offload data management and protection from your core IT team.
Revyz Data Manager for Jira can store data securely and remotely, making it available for various recovery scenarios without having you rollback the entire site.
Try Revyz for free - Atlassian marketplace link. Share your feedback on how we can improve and what other use cases you would want Revyz to address.