Best practices for your Jira backup strategy

How much do you depend on Jira? Maybe you've never thought about it, but try to imagine what would happen if you lost access to your data for a while or, worse, suffered a data loss! Feeling stressed? Well, just think back to one of Atlassian's most notorious outages, when more than 700 Jira users were unable to access their data for two weeks!

Human error, software and hardware failures, and ransomware attacks can lead to continuous downtime, data and financial losses. To stay resilient and have peace of mind, your organization should consider having a Jira backup plan in place. There are also Atlassian Marketplace applications that can provide this. One such example is GitProtect.io Backups for Jira Cloud by Xopero Software.

It streamlines and automates data protection and disaster recovery of Jira data to ensure uninterrupted project management and eliminate service outages, human error, and attack effects. It helps companies stay on top of compliance, security, and the shared responsibility model regulations.

Automate backups: boost your team's productivity

One of the most desirable yet difficult-to-achieve data protection features is automation. Usually, when you write a backup script, you have to perform all the backups manually, which takes a lot of time. So, to increase your productivity and time efficiency, you need to have all your Jira backups performed automatically. This way, all you need to do is monitor backup performance. Here are the key questions that your backup plan should answer.

What should my Jira backup contain?

Every piece of your Jira data is valuable, and losing it can have unpredictable consequences. That's why your backup solution for Jira, whether it's Jira Software, Jira Service Management, or Jira Work Management, should cover all the data that's critical to your ongoing workflow.

How do you ensure data accessibility?

The answer is simple: The 3-2-1 backup rule. In the world of data protection, this rule has already become the gold standard. It requires that you have at least three copies in at least two locations, one of which must be offsite.

To meet this standard, you first need to make sure that your backup tool has some sort of storage compatibility, so that you can keep copies both in the Cloud and on-premise (at least two storage instances).

Then, to ensure you can easily access your backups at any time, you should have the ability to automatically replicate your backups between these storages. This way, if one of your storages goes down, you can always run your copy from another storage.

How do I avoid overloading my storage?

Over time you will have more and more backups. This raises the question of how to use your storage space wisely. Of course, you could decide to delete the copies manually, but this is too time-consuming (especially if you work in the most critical areas, such as finance, and need to make backups every 5 minutes).

However, there are benefits to using a professional backup and DR tool. For example, when setting up a backup plan with GitProtect.io, you can choose a model that will help you save storage space: First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS).

This allows you to set retention for full, differential and incremental backups, saving you storage space by not having to do a full backup of your Jira data every time.

Backup security: Include the most reliable features

When building your Jira backup strategy, make sure that your backup includes all the necessary security measures, such as:

• Secure login: SAML Single Sign-On (SSO), which allows the organization's users to authenticate to Jira through their existing identity provider, such as Okta, OneLogin, Auth0, etc.
• Encryption: AES-based in-flight and at rest encryption is a must, and the ability to provide your own encryption key can even increase the security of your Jira data.
• Ability to choose a data center location to suit your business needs. In the case of GitProtect.io, you can choose to store your Jira data in either European or US data centers.
• Ransomware protection, including immutable storage, which guarantees that even if ransomware hits your storage, it won't be able to spread and infect all the files in the storage.
• Security compliance. Make sure your provider adheres to the best security standards so you can too.

All of these features can strengthen your business security and help your organization meet international security standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, based on security, availability, processing integrity, privacy, and the confidentiality of data.

Backup monitoring: Take control of backup performance

You may not be responsible for managing backup software, but there's no denying that a sophisticated, personalized monitoring center is of great use, as it can easily help you keep an eye on backup performance, status checks, admin roles, and permissions granted to your team members, and of course audit logs that help you track every action performed within the software.

We've already mentioned that backup automation is critical to the time efficiency and productivity of your DevOps team. The same goes for backup monitoring. It's much easier for your team to see the big picture of backup performance when you get notifications (Slack or email) and SLA reports, which take some of the responsibility off your security team.

Data recovery and disaster recovery: Be prepared for any eventuality

We mentioned at the beginning that there are many situations where you need to make quick decisions and recover your data immediately. Service outages, downtime, and threat actor activity all require your organization to be ready for any disaster recovery (DR) scenario. But there is another important use case: Cloud migrations!

After all, it is the backup that allows you to easily restore data to another location. So your DR plan should allow you to efficiently restore all Jira data to multiple locations, e.g., the same Jira account, a different one (even if it's free with no-user recovery option), or any local machine. This is the only way you can provide your team with uninterrupted project management and eliminate any potential business downtime.

But remember, the foundation of effective disaster recovery is a reliable backup plan. As with all cloud services, your Jira data should be properly backed up. After all, you don't want to imagine losing Jira data, do you?

As your project grows, your Jira account grows

As your project grows, your Jira account grows with critical data that needs to be reliably protected.

Atlassian has made it clear in its Cloud security shared responsibilities that it is your responsibility to "back up your data." So if you don't want to risk your business continuity, follow these simple steps to make your critical Jira data accessible, available, and recoverable at all times.

Want to go deeper? We recommend this webinar on Jira backup best practices.