Did you know that 9 out of 10 new Atlassian customers prefer the cloud over on-prem? Atlassian empowers many engineering and IT organisations to drive new innovation, utilise high-quality software tools for collaboration, and scale their teams with a cloud-based foundation.
Yet, most DevOps teams are completely taken by surprise when their development cycles are disrupted due to an unexpected data loss in critical Jira projects, or when their revenue stream is interrupted due to an asset loss in Jira Service Management.
The reason? Mistakenly believing that Jira, Confluence, or JSM data backup is Atlassian’s responsibility.
This is where cloud data backup solutions come into the picture. Because apart from maintaining system-level backups and infrastructure security, Atlassian will NOT take any responsibility if data on your Atlassian cloud becomes unusable, destroyed, or stolen.
To better understand Atlassian’s shared responsibility model, download Atlassian’s Cloud Security Shared Responsibilities whitepaper today!
In this blog, we will look into what constitutes a data loss, what are the reasons and implications of losing your company or customer data, and why should you consider cloud backup to prevent data loss and ensure proper data protection.
What is data loss?
In its simplest terms, data loss is an incident wherein accidental or intentional factors, such as deletions, corruptions, power outages, ransomware attacks, theft, or natural disasters result in your company either completely losing its data (or a portion of it) or being left with data that has become unusable or unreadable. This includes all your data—whether stored in your company or personal devices, in your applications or on-premise locations—in a datacentre or on the cloud.
For example, your developer may accidentally erase a critical project in Jira which causes the deletion of hundreds of issues. Or your IT manager may unintentionally delete a Confluence page, thus making you lose years of knowledge in the process.
And data loss is no laughing matter, either. According to this study by Statista Research, 64% of survey respondents named data loss and information leakage as their biggest cloud security concern. Issues concerning data privacy and confidentiality, as well as accidental exposure of credentials, took second and third place respectively. This goes on to prove that as organisations across the globe continue to migrate to the cloud, security issues are becoming more rampant.
What causes data loss? What are its consequences?
As persistent users of smart personal devices, we are all aware how carelessness, mishandling, or even changing or reformatting your device can sometimes cause us to lose our files, pictures, chats, or contacts. Imagine the consequences of losing all-important customer information, user accounts, or your company’s financial data!
Here are some common scenarios that can lead to a potential data loss:
1. Human error
This is, by far, the most common cause of data loss in companies today, and a key aspect that you should worry about. Human error, although unintentional, can lead to accidental deletion of files or folders, which can in turn impact your projects, disrupt day-to-day operations, or even trigger a security breach.
2. Software corruption
The data on your Atlassian cloud can get easily corrupted due to hardware failures or software malfunctions. Your applications could crash during an update or a migration. Sometimes your anti-virus software can turn out to be the culprit as it may mistakenly register your data as malware.
3. Ransomware attacks
More than ever before, SaaS applications, like the Atlassian cloud, are targets for computer viruses such as ransomware. Viruses typically infiltrate and corrupt company data stored in your organisation’s network systems. Data loss can also occur due to email phishing that seems to come from a known sender, prompting the recipients to click on a corrupted link.
4. Cloud outages
The recent Sydney cloud outage is probably still fresh in everybody’s mind, where major cloud providers, including Oracle, Microsoft, and NetSuite, experienced significant outages in the Sydney, Australia region. These disruptions were triggered by various factors—from a power surge causing cooling problems to a lightning storm affecting data centre infrastructure—which majorly affected their cloud customers.
Sudden power failures (combined with natural disasters, as in this case) can cause damage to your computer hardware or operating system and result in loss of data, if not backed up properly.
Other possible scenarios include theft of physical data storage devices, hacking, or mishandling of a computer’s hard drive.
Of course, a key point to keep in mind here is how many companies (despite opting to upgrade their business operations to the Atlassian cloud) have very little understanding of how to maintain and secure their cloud data. Especially with medium-to-large scale enterprises, operations tend to be siloed, and most roles and privileges may not be clearly defined. Moreover, the technical team are sometimes unaware that by not securely configuring their cloud services, they remain prone to data loss.
And the implications of data loss? It could be as damaging as a bankruptcy or a lawsuit, as harmful as non-compliance with regulatory requirements, or just plain loss of reputation and customer trust. Moreover, data loss in your Atlassian cloud can lead to late development cycles, interrupted workflows, and missed releases, thus negatively impacting your engineering projects.
Backing up your Atlassian cloud data is the first and most important step to be taken here. Here we detail why cloud data backup and recovery is important and how you can protect and recover your data in the Atlassian cloud.
What is cloud backup?
Cloud backup, also known as online or remote backup, is the process of backing up your Atlassian data and storing it in a safe, offsite location that will enable you to recover your data in case of any data loss. This means that a copy of your data would be saved on one or more remote servers provided either by your Atlassian partner or by your cloud backup service provider (such as our backup-as-a-service partner, HYCU). This ensures that organisations would be able to fully restore their business-critical Atlassian data—such as projects, issues, configurations, and attachments, directly to production—in the event of any data loss incident.
A cloud backup makes sense, not only because it helps ensure data recovery but also since it helps you effortlessly safeguard your data and applications from cybercriminals and keeps your data protected, private, and compliant.
Why is cloud backup necessary?
Simply because you can never predict when a catastrophic data loss or theft might occur.
In fact, this report states that SaaS applications are not only the prime target for ransomware attacks but have also been attacked successfully more than any other environment (over 52% of the time!)
The Optus data breach of 2022 is a prime example. Termed the worst-ever data breach incident in Australian history, Aussie telecommunication giant, Optus suffered a cyber-attack that led to as many as 10 million customer accounts getting exposed. The stolen data included personal information such as phone numbers and dates of birth of Optus customers, which led government agencies to propose a fine against the firm for not being vigilant with customer data.
Data backup and recovery (and more importantly, proper cloud security!) can help organisations mitigate cyber attacks by maintaining additional copies of sensitive data on multiple servers, which can only be accessed through proper authentication. This data can also be easily safeguarded and recovered immediately with ransomware protection provided by your cloud data protection provider.
How does Atlassian cloud backup and recovery work?
While migrating your Jira and Confluence software to the Atlassian cloud relieves your IT team from day-to-day management and maintenance, your data could still benefit from the robust protection offered by a cloud backup service provider. The reason, as stated before, being that while Atlassian performs system-level disaster recovery, they do not perform tenant-level backup in case of a data loss incident. The Atlassian shared responsibility model makes it clear that customers are responsible for their own data.
It is possible that when you’re running your projects on the data centre or server editions, your IT team could easily take snapshots of your data and store them on-premises. However, in the cloud version, your customers can only export their data manually or script the data with very limited recovery options—making streamlined backup necessary.
Related reading: Check out some of the common misconceptions that exist around data backup and recovery in the Atlassian cloud
In such a scenario, partnering with a reputed cloud data protection provider can help you:
- Avoid data loss and achieve cost-efficient data protection
- Simplify data backup and enable rapid restoration
- Safeguard your SaaS applications
- Avoid lengthy disruptions
- Ensure regulatory compliance
- Achieve protection from ransomware attacks
- Eliminate costly purchases of hardware appliances and plugins
- Streamline your enterprise data security measures
- Ensure business continuity
Moreover, your cloud backup partner can provide you with flexible options to back up your data, based on your volume of data as well as the rate of change of data. They also provide flexible recovery options—such as restoring only that data which has been modified or deleted—and leaving clean data untouched.
Ensure data backup and recovery when migrating to the Atlassian cloud with Corptec & HYCU’s game-changing partnership
Corptec recently announced its partnership with HYCU—the world’s leading data protection as a service platform provider that helps you automate your backups, unlock granular restore, and store ransomware-proof copies safely in the cloud. Together with Corptec’s expertise, we can not only help you migrate to the Atlassian cloud in a scalable and flexible way but also help you:
- Restore projects, epics, bugs, tasks, sub-tasks, attachments, and even configurations in Jira
- Recover entire sites and spaces and/or instantly restore individual blogs, attachments, and comments in Confluence
- Restore projects, assets, attachments, changes, incidents, and service requests in Jira Service Management
- Protect and restore critical data in Jira Work Management, Jira Product Discovery, and even Trello!
Read more about HYCU’s cloud data recovery strategy in this blog.
If you are interested in learning how Corptec can help you empower your business with Atlassian solutions, request a consultation today!
As a Gold Solution partner since 2018, Corptec Technology Partners has helped organisations across Australia achieve success with Atlassian products while adhering to Atlassian best practices. Our solution consultants come with extensive knowledge and experience dealing with Atlassian product suites and can help you overcome any Atlassian cloud challenge, regardless of the project size.
