The State of Play: Is Atlassian Still a Safe Bet?

Atlassian’s deeply integrated ecosystem of tools is now an essential part of thousands of companies. In fact, the company claims to have over 200,000 customers.

And it’s no wonder; Jira, Confluence, Trello – and everything else in the full Atlassian suite – offer incredible power and flexibility. These tools are so well connected that using any combination is seamless, once setup is complete. It’s everything that businesses need to operate efficiently and productively – regardless of department.

But is it dangerous to put all of your eggs in one, Atlassian-shaped basket? What if there’s an outage, and all online or cloud services go down? What if there’s a high-level security breach, or a cyber attack focused on Atlassian?

After all, these events are a daily occurrence for some digital firms, who hold highly sensitive data.

Is Atlassian reliable? Well…

Atlassian outages

Atlassian has suffered outages – just like Google, Facebook et al. One of the biggest events happened in April 2022, when Atlassian services were down for two weeks. This was due to a rogue script, run by the company itself as part of scheduled maintenance.

The script was intended to target and delete legacy data, but spiralled out of control and deleted everything. Thankfully, Atlassian’s backups are global and complete, meaning the bare minimum of data loss occurred.

Even though it took two weeks to recover, there are few companies in the world that could recover from such an event any faster, and 35% of businesses had their data fully restored within days.

This is an extremely rare event, for any company. And while it’s pretty embarrassing, it’s a tiny blip when compared to Atlassian’s financially-backed SLA of 99.95% uptime for Jira and Confluence Cloud Enterprise plans.

But what about vulnerability from attacks – is Altassian secure?

Attacks on Atlassian security

Any software or digital service – regardless of how useful, benign, or robust it is – will be prone to attack. All it has to do is exist, and armies of crackers, hackers, and even hobbyists will begin to look for back doors and vulnerabilities to exploit.

Nothing is immune.

Even Apple, a tech company that practically brands itself on security (and has famously denied the FBI access to their customer’s encrypted data) regularly patches its operating systems and applications against exploits and vulnerabilities.

It’s no surprise that Atlassian is a target for attacks, too.

At the end of May, Atlassian issued a patch for Confluence Server, as attempts to exploit a zero-day vulnerability spiked. Bad actors were attempting to maliciously hijack servers through gaps in Confluence, for the purposes of mining cryptocurrency and delivering ransomware.

A security event was also patched for Jira in 2021.

The risks of moving to Atlassian

As you can see, these events are rare, and almost always dealt with swiftly. Atlassian is, compared with other platforms and suites, highly reliable and incredibly secure, with a near-perfect operational history.

Moving to any new platform carries risks, and Atlassian is no different. But a properly managed Cloud migration (with a Cloud migration expert on your team) will be close to risk-free, if a phased approach with multiple backups is adopted.

Atlassian is still, absolutely, a safe bet. Even if all your tools, company knowledge, and workflows seem to be in one basket.

That’s because, as the outage in April is testament to, the company is fanatical about backups. And not just single, or off-site, or physical, or cloud backups.

Atlassian’s cloud redundancy is second to none, with data duplication over multiple sites – with physical and digital reproduction constantly happening. Even in a worst-case scenario, like April’s incident, there’s always a way back.

Can your business do that with an on-site server room?

The risks of staying with legacy tools

If you run an ageing server rack or small data centre for your business, its days are numbered. Quite literally.

Hardware either fails, or software outpaces it. Architectures change – like the shift to ARM over x86. Eventually though, the entire ecosystem you’ve built will cease to operate. And if you’re still doing manual backups, or using physical media, your operation costs and efficiency are going to suffer.

Critical ops from custom implementations need custom solutions.

Businesses should be looking to private Cloud and hybrid systems, making moves to enhance their internal data security and disaster recovery procedures – or seeking solutions like Atlassian.

The benefits of moving to Atlassian Cloud

• Peace of mind
• Improved security
• Lower costs
• Data residency
• Best practices for redundancy and resilience
• Freed IT teams – no more manual data centre maintenance

Atlassian conducted a survey of their clients, which showed that 84% of CTOs saw the benefits of their cloud migration in less than 6 months. So, even with some blips over the years – going all-in on Atlassian (and joining the some-200,000 happy customers on the platform) is definitely a safe bet.

In fact, staying put on your legacy servers could be the riskiest option.

Ready to go to the Cloud? Let’s help you migrate your systems over, with an expert on your team.

Atlassian Cloud Migration Experts

ClearHub specialises in finding the best Atlassian Cloud migration, pairing businesses with the most talented cloud engineers and contractors in the world. Everyone in the ClearHub network is vetted, skills-checked and ready to go.

To get started, call +44 (0) 2381 157811 or send your message to info@clearhub.tech..