What's the Atlassian Disaster Recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is critical for software. It ensures business continuity. The business continuity is a plan describing the process to follow in case of a disaster in any company's software stack. This plan guarantees the correct system functioning, therefore, avoids economic losses. Here we will tell you what's the Atlassian disaster recovery plan.

The Atlassian tools guarantee the availability of the main instances even when those become unavailable. The Data Center deployment option includes a cold standby strategy configuration that allows it. A failover strategy and disaster recovery planning are fundamental to achieving high availability of systems and software tools.

With Atlassian's disaster recovery for Data Center, index replication, attachment updates, and database synchronization can meet specific requirements that adhere to your customized plan.

Business continuity planning vs. disaster recovery

Business continuity and disaster recovery practices are concepts often used without further differentiation between them. However, each of these terms refers to different concepts:

Disaster recovery is a method that helps an organization recover access and functionality in an IT infrastructure after a natural or man-made disaster and is part of business continuity.
Business continuity is a strategy that allows an organization to operate with minimal downtime.

First, when performing business continuity planning, a business impact analysis must be developed, including assessing and prioritizing business functions. As part of this planning, it's necessary to identify the potential impact that a disaster could have on the IT area. Business impact analyses may also include:

Estimates of the maximum downtime the company can afford without incurring significant losses.
Establishing ideal recovery times.
Conducting a business impact analysis to identify possible dependencies and thus cover each likely scenario.

When creating a business continuity plan performing a risk assessment by analyzing the impact on the business it's necessary. This step helps the organization analyze threats and consider the probability and severity of potential disasters.

Each company should prioritize its business processes and conduct a gap analysis against its existing policies. Risk assessments can also influence the organization's willingness to invest to achieve better results.

Advantages of having a disaster recovery plan in place

A disaster recovery plan is a documented process to quickly recover mission-critical software tools after a disaster.

All this planning is fine; however, it's not until a real-life disaster occurs when the actual scenarios are confronted, and this planning is tested. It should be noted that, in principle, disaster recovery plans are primarily theoretical.

The benefits of having a disaster recovery plan include fast recovery times and minimizing the possibility of downtime or data loss in the event of a disaster.

A disaster recovery plan will consist of three elements. These are:

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the extent to which systems need to be upgraded after a failure or the amount of data you can afford to lose in a failure.
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is how quickly you need your backup system to be available after a failure.
Recovery Cost Objective (RCO) is the amount of money you intend to spend on your disaster recovery plan or solution.

Types of disaster recovery plans

Incidents within IT systems are caused by either natural or human-caused circumstances. Cyber threats, human error, poor planning, and hardware or software failures might happen. Regardless of how a disaster occurs, the problem is the downtime, which causes productivity losses and the inability to generate revenue. A disaster recovery plan's larger scope covers the best results it will deliver.

Disaster recovery plans should be created for each software tool in the company, for both self-managed tools (Atlassian Server and Data Center) and those hosted in the cloud. In recent years, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) tools has grown in popularity, providing third-party replication and hosting services to provide failover to another location.

Depending on your organization's infrastructure, you may also need to create a disaster recovery plan to cover the physical aspects of your IT software infrastructure, your organization's network infrastructure, and any virtual machines used.

Configuring Data Center products to implement a disaster recovery strategy

Atlassian's Data Center products help you implement a disaster recovery strategy with Data Center versions of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, only requiring the team to set up cold standby instances in the event of a disaster. Guaranteeing business continuity and maintaining your recovery time objective, even in the face of a complete system outage, it's possible with Atlassian tools.

The general steps to be followed to set up disaster recovery are simple:

The IT team will have to create a backup system without starting it up.
Implement a data replication strategy. It's important to note that replicating data to your backup location is critical for the cold standby strategy to work correctly. You don't want to failover to your backup instance and find out that it's out of date or that it will take many hours to re-index the database.

Learn about the future of Data Center products >>

If you have an active Data Center license, you will not need to purchase additional or separate licenses to start Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket in a cold standby instance.

Disaster Recovery testing

👀 Don't wait for a disaster to happen before knowing whether your disaster recovery plan will work or not. 👀

People involved in emergency services, such as firefighters and medics, regularly practice rescue skills, so why shouldn't your team? By ongoing regular disaster recovery testing, your team will become familiar and comfortable with high-pressure situations, leading to a quicker and happier resolution.

Steps for Disaster Recovery testing in Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket Data Center

We suggest isolating the production data before performing any disaster recovery testing.
Ensure the failover system (standby database) is ready, and the application is up and running.
Don't forget to monitor log files and check for consistency issues.
After testing, reset the Disaster Recovery deployment by restoring the standby components to a state where replication can occur.
In many cases, it may be easier to reconfigure your standby infrastructure.

Are you interested in implementing this functionality in your Atlassian Data Center products, but you are unsure how? DEISER is Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner Enterprise; that is, we help you with everything involving Atlassian tools in each of its versions. If you need further assistance, contact us below.