Why Backup Jira: Is There Any Risk of Data Loss?

If you work in IT, then you definitely know why using such tools as Jira is more than a must. Let’s look at the numbers that Atlassian gives us… over 65K companies worldwide rely on Jira Software. Unfortunately, though, have they caught themselves on the thought that it is safe enough? What will the CTO, IT manager, or software house owner do if the Atlassian outage takes place? Well, an outage isn’t the only risk that leads to data loss… But let’s come to this issue a little bit later, and now let’s heat up the importance of data protection by figuring out why Jira is so necessary for our development process.

How Do Teams Benefit From Jira?

Jira greatly simplifies task management and takes on project managers’ requirements, like workflow estimation, project analytics, and many more. 

When it comes to DevOps teams, it is the perfect software for issue and backlog tracking, integrations of CI/CD, and developer tools. In addition, this software grants the teams visibility into branches, pull requests, builds, and deployments allowing them to release earlier and with peace of mind.

By offering issue prioritization and other features, it permits software testers to iron out issues in software products, which boosts the entire company’s productivity. 

Product managers benefit from Jira as this tool allows them to complete product road mapping and share roadmaps even remotely, establishing map dependencies.

Can Something Go Wrong With My Jira Data?

This is a question that every DevOps, CTO, IT Manager, or Security Leader should ask themselves when they start using any software that they will greatly rely on. Well, basically, every team member should ask himself this question. So, if you need arguments to raise to decide whether your Jira environment needs professional backup software support, here they are:

1. Outages

Instead of fluent phrases that outages happen, let’s mention the latest huge Atlassian Jira outage in April 2022 – the incident which happened due to miscommunication between teams and led to 775 Jira customers couldn’t access their data for a fortnight. Atlassian engineers had to make a number of steps to restore all the sites, and all their operations were semi-automated and needed manual intervention. 

Well, can an outage like that repeat? You can believe or check it yourself; just go to the Jira Software Status, where you will see that there were smaller outages in March, July, and September. 

And how many are to come? No one knows. But what we know for sure is the catastrophic result of such a failure – loss of budget and time, it may even be the loss of the work already done.     

2. Human Errors

Human mistake is probably one of the most common reasons when it comes to cybersecurity incidents. Why not remember the almost forgotten “five whys” method of Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda: ask the question “Why?” up to five times, and you will find the root of the problem. In most cases, the reason for the problem will be a human mistake in the end. 

For example, the mentioned-above Atlassian outage in April. If we ask why that Jira outage happened, the final reason will be human error – lack of communication between teams, wrong API, and, as a result, an outage that influenced more than 700 customers.

But human errors can happen in your company – malicious or unintentional, and both can result in wiping out your Jira data.

3. Ransomware

Probably one of the most expensive threats for any business is ransomware. Just imagine every 11 seconds, some ransomware attack happens somewhere in the world. 

After the attack, the only thing the user has is a notification that his data has been encrypted, and now he needs to pay a ransom to get his data back… It’s double financial loss – first, you need to pay the attacker, and is there any assurance that he will give the data back safe and sound? The attacker may either fail to return, modify, or encrypt it. 

Second, business downtime, and who knows how much time the company will need to recover – usually, it lasts for days. Then, add here weeks of restoring the system… Sounds scary. Though, if you have a ransomware-proof DevOps backup in place, you can continue your work after running the backup copy from any point in time. 

4. Hardware and Software Errors

Another problem that can slow down, postpone, or disable your development process is hardware or software failure. It’s not a secret that machines break down. What about software? It needs constant updates to work continuously. 

On the other hand, even updates can lead to some failures. For example, if there is an unnoticed bug in the new update, the system can fail. So, isn’t it better to foresee a problem and back up your Jira data?

5. Shared Responsibility Model

It is not a secret that Atlassian, like any other SaaS provider, delivers its service according to the Shared Responsibility Model that defines the obligations of each of the parties – the provider and the customer. Thus, the provider’s responsibility comes down to the entire system and infrastructure accessibility, security, and availability. The customer, on the other hand, is responsible for his own data. So to say, it is his obligation to build data protection schemes. 

In a nutshell, if there is an entire Atlassian outage, the provider will need to handle it. Though, if you have your Jira account’s outage or there is a ransomware attack in your environment, the only responsible person for that is you. That’s why it is crucial to know how to back up the Jira environment and how to arrange your backup policy right to eliminate data loss. 

6. Compliance With Security Audits

SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are the most famous security audits the company wants to pass. Let’s figure out why so…  

First, to succeed in those Audits, the company needs to correspond to so-called “security pillars,” including security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy. This, in its turn, leads to the second point – trustworthiness and positioning itself as a reliable service among other similar ones. 

By the way, backup is one of the requirements to meet SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards.

Takeaway 

As you can see, there are a lot of pitfalls that threaten not only your Jira data but also your business continuity which, unfortunately, leads to financial loss. Is there a way to withstand the threats mentioned above? Yeap… It’s a backup. 

You can arrange your own backup, delegate some members of your team to write backup scripts, perform those scripts, and monitor the performance of those backups. It can be time-consuming and will need a lot of attentiveness from your DevSecOps team, as the most important is to make that backup recoverable.

Though what if we told you that there is an easy and comfortable way to protect all your Jira environment, including data from all Jira Cloud, Jira Service Management, and Jira Work Management? Moreover, this way isn’t time-consuming, with exceptional monitoring capabilities, and leaves your employees a lot of time for the product development process.