A Way To Build A Comprehensive Backup Strategy

Uploaded on 2024-05-16 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms

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Many IT companies rely on the tools necessary to effectively manage their projects. Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Work Management are among these tools. Accidentally deleted data, outages, and ransomware attacks are among the reasons to start backing up the Jira ecosystem and having disaster recovery strategies in place.

Jira backup best practices can help improve task accessibility and guarantee quick recovery with a few clicks. Organizations that implement these practices into their workflow can protect their reputation, customer trust, and valuable hours of work from potential downtime.

Top Bits Of Advice To Build A Reliable Backup Plan For Jira Data

All SaaS providers, Atlassian isn't an exception here, rely on the Shared Responsibility Model which defines the responsibilities of each party - service provider and customer's - when it comes to data protection. Thus, within the Atlassian Cloud Security Shared Responsibility Model, the service provider is responsible for its services to run smoothly and uninterruptedly, and a user's duty is to build its account-level data protection, which includes backup, of course.

To build a robust backup strategy, you need to make sure that your backup plan covers all aspects of backup processes - backup performance, backup security, and restore and Disaster Recovery. This trio will help you guarantee that your sensitive project data is accessible and recoverable from any point in time, ensuring your business continuity.

Backup performance tips and tricks

Let's start with the first component of our backup trio - Backup performance. To be sure that your backup for the Jira ecosystem is reliable and every piece of data is recoverable in any event of failure, your backup should have full data coverage of your Jira Software, Jira Work Management, and Jira Service Management. Thus, once you pick up your backup solution, make sure that it covers everything - projects, issues, comments, roles, users, attachments, workflows, boards, etc.

During the working day, there can be a lot of changes in your Jira environment, and if you always have only full data backups, in a while, it can overload your storage. Thus, while building your backup plan, you need to think of incremental backups, so that you back up only the changing blocks of data since the previous backup copy. Moreover, those regular backups should be scheduled and automated, as it will greatly save your technical team's time for performing backup processes.

Among other critical backup performance best practices, we should mention:

the possibility of keeping backed-up data in multiple storage locations - both cloud and local. Such an opportunity can help to increase data redundancy and resilience, as you may keep up with the golden backup standard - the 3-2-1 backup rule, assuming that you have at least 3 copies in 2 different storage locations, with one copy offsite.

replication between backup storage destinations that allows you to have consistent backup copies in different storage destinations, ensuring compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule and establishing better business continuity and uptime.

flexible long-term and unlimited retention, which ensures that you have the possibility to keep your Jira data backup copies for as long as your organization, security, and compliance requirements state.

easy backup performance monitoring capabilities that will notify you about the state of your backup processes - email and Slack notifications, advanced audit logs. In this case, you will be able to quickly address any issues that can arise during the backup performance.

Backup Security Basics

Another aspect that you need to pay special attention to is the backup security features of your Jira data backup. Why? It's not a secret that security is the most pressing concern for most businesses these days as losing even the smallest piece of Jira data can lead to devastating consequences. For this reason, you should have access to several security mechanisms in your Jira Cloud backups that greatly increase the likelihood that you can access and recover your Jira data from any point in time. Moreover, it will help you maintain at the top of regulatory compliance.

Thus, to ensure the best security measures for your Jira data, make sure that your backup for Jira provides you with:

AES 256 level of encryption with the possibility of setting up your custom encryption key,
in-flight and at-rest encryption,
up to unlimited retention,
ransomware protection,
easy management and monitoring capabilities of your Jira backup solution,
multi-tenancy and the possibility of adding additional admins and assigning different privileges within your team,
restore capabilities.

Restore and Disaster Recovery Features

Finally, the third aspect of the unbreakable trio for building a comprehensive backup strategy for the Jira ecosystem is restore data and Disaster Recovery capabilities. And it's easy to understand - we need backup to be able to restore our critical project data immediately without workflow interruption. Unexpected disruptions may cause chaos to critical systems, compromising productivity and revenue streams. To combat these threats, we need to implement an effective restore solution.

So, to make sure that you can recover your Jira data in any event of failure and withstand any disaster scenario - service downtime, your infrastructure outage, or any other event of a disruption, your backup and restore solution should enable granular recovery to restore your data in case of accidental deletion, for example. Moreover, you should be able to retrieve data fully from any point in time, targeting different restore destinations - to the same or a new Jira account, to your local device.

Your Service Provider Is Down

It may be a headache for a company that relies on Jira a lot if Atlassian service is down. The worst Jira outage happened in April 2022 when around 700 users couldn't access their data for a fortnight. In a situation like that, with the help of professional backup software, you can instantly retrieve your Jira production data from the latest backup copy or a definite point in time to the same or new account, or to your local machine.

Your Infrastructure Is Down

In cases when your own infrastructure goes down and you have a comprehensive backup solution in place that provides you with multi-storage compatibility and replication feature to meet the 3-2-1 backup rule, you can simply run your backup copy from another storage. Remember? The core of this backup rule is to have a few copies in different storage locations. So, there should be no worries, as in this situation, you can restore your data from any point in time from your second or third storage destination.

Takeaway

Atlassian's responsibility for service operations does not eliminate the necessity for users to protect their data. Here you have different Jira backup options - Atlassian's Backup Manager, the backup CLI, writing your DIY Jira backup, or using third-party backup apps. It's up to you to decide, the most important is to build an efficient and effective backup plan that will guarantee your business continuity.

GitProtect.io is a professional backup and Disaster Recovery solution for Jira Software, Jira Work Management, and Jira Service Management that can help teams have automated backups, and guarantee cyber resilience, compliance, and data recoverability in any event of disaster. Furthermore, it also provides backups for Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab, which grants full data security across your DevOps ecosystem.

Learn more about Jira Backup Best Practices. Try Backup & DR software for Jira on Atlassian Marketplace.

Image: Ideogram

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