Atlassian Cloud data residency unlocked in the UK and Switzerland

More Atlassian Cloud data residency options

On 9 February 2024, Atlassian opened up another two data residency options for its Cloud products in the UK and Switzerland, giving you the option of having your core data pinned to these locations.

Get the need-to-knows from this blog post and establish what it means for you in practical terms.

What does data residency mean for Cloud products?

Atlassian provides a choice of 12 geographic locations where data at rest can be pinned for its core Cloud products:

• Jira Software
• Jira Service Management
• Jira Work Management
• Jira Product Discovery
• Confluence
• Atlassian Analytics and Atlassian Data Lake

If you have security needs or contractual obligations that require your data to be held in a particular geographical location, you have plenty of choice over where your data can be held.

The opening of these locations unlocks the opportunity for UK and Swiss companies that have been waiting for this capability to now begin their Atlassian Cloud migrations.

What pinned data really means

Atlassian Cloud is a complex SaaS solution; data is held at rest in all kinds of locations, so although your core data may be pinned to one, other information, such as user profile, configuration, and other metadata, could be held outside of the country you selected.

For example, my user profile won’t be anchored to the UK even if one of the main sites I access is pinned there because the profile is a global entity centrally managed within Atlassian Cloud.

To learn more about this, see Atlassian’s documentation on understanding data residency.

Marketplace app data

Some Marketplace apps store data or configurations along with the Atlassian product data, while other Marketplace apps store it externally to the Atlassian products. This can have implications for data residency and security, and often as part of a Cloud security assessment, checks are made to find out what information is being held and where.

Quite often it’s configuration data, so nothing that would require pinning, but it’s worth checking.

To find out which apps support data residency, go to the Atlassian Marketplace, and look for the privacy and security section.

Other products

Some of you might have noticed that Bitbucket isn’t on the list, as well as a couple of other products. Rest assured, it’s in the works, so refer to the Atlassian Cloud Roadmap for information about when these products will be available.

If you’ve already got a Cloud site

If you already have a site, it will either be “global,” in which case Atlassian decides on the territory to pin your data, or you may have already selected a location, such as the EU.

The good news is that you can move your data to a new geography; the bad news is that there will be a loss of service for the period of time needed to move it.

An org admin can request a site be moved from “Security->Data Residency” in the “Admin hub.” It’s a simple process of selecting the new location, choosing a time window, and then submitting the request. The estimated downtime and amount of data that will be migrated will be shown before you submit the request; during this downtime, you won’t be able to access your products. This can take up to 24 hours for larger sites, so be prepared to plan a weekend maintenance window if necessary. For more information on this process, see Atlassian's info.

If you’d like to discuss your Atlassian Cloud migration, the pros and cons, your options, or something else, we can help.