The cloud and customer trust
Trust is a complex, partly emotionally driven conviction. We assume that a certain person or institution is honest and will remain that way. We believe they wouldn’t want to harm us and are concerned for our well-being.
In this respect, trust is characterized by a cooperative aspect: We link our well-being and security in part to the behavior of those in whom we place our trust. And as the saying goes: Not many things are as difficult to build and as easy to break than trust.
The software manufacturers of today are well aware of this. Trust plays a central role in the age of modern cloud software, because: When a company abandons its traditional, self-operated server systems in favor of cloud solutions, it means that it is placing its trust in a provider and the infrastructure it uses. Your organization is putting the protection of its data and information (and therefore essential security and compliance issues) in the hands of another company and its teams.
The issue of data residency as a building block for building trust
When it comes to the cloud, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is meeting national and European data management requirements - and it's not just companies in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance or the public sector that regularly deal with this. Cloud service providers are aware of their responsibility and are working hard to earn and justify trust by meeting high, comprehensive data protection, security and compliance requirements.
The cloud provider infrastructure in question includes remote data centers where the data is stored. Most large cloud providers - including Atlassian - use dozens of data centers in all regions of the world. The exact location of your data within these data centers is referred to as "data residency".
And with the local data residency option, your organization can prevent information from leaving a region you specify. In the case of Atlassian, this means that you have the option of explicitly specifying Germany as a data residency region!
This local data residency option gives your organization control over where its data is stored and processed. And the answer to this question is very important from a compliance perspective.
Atlassian, marketplace apps and data residency
Your company can define that your data is only stored in data centers within Germany - so far, so good: this is an important building block in the data protection and compliance strategy! In the case of Atlassian, however, this topic is a little more complex.
The data residency option has been available for the most popular Atlassian cloud products since the end of 2022. But what about the marketplace apps used, which extend Jira, Confluence & Co. beyond the standard and open up a wide range of additional use cases? If the main product, such as Jira, supports local data residency, but your apps transfer the data to locations all over the world, key compliance challenges remain.
Now there is finally a solution!
Data residency for Forge
Forge is Atlassian's official development platform for apps. It provides the development environment, interfaces and tools that external development teams need to create and operate secure, stable and high-quality app integrations. And now Atlassian has started the roll-out of Data Residency for Forge hosted storage.
What does that mean? In a nutshell: Apps that support this feature also support the data residency option selected for the base product. This means that the specific app data is explicitly stored in the same data residency region as the data of the base product. And the good news is that more and more marketplace providers are getting their act together and creating consistency.
Set the preferred hosting location for data with Templating.app for Jira
Templating.app is a sophisticated solution for creating templates for epics, tasks and subtasks and reusing them at any time at the touch of a button. It is one of the Marketplace apps that already support data residency for Forge hosted storage. It therefore fulfills the gold standard for third-party apps in the Atlassian ecosystem. This can also be seen in the Privacy & Security tab of an app:
In plain language, this means that if your Jira admins set a specific hosting location for the Jira instance, for example the USA, the Templating.app will also be migrated there automatically. If data residency is configured in the USA, this also applies to the app and its data.
This creates uniform data protection and compliance standards across the main product and app. This drastically reduces complexity - making Templating.app just as trustworthy as the Atlassian products themselves.
Templating.app is available on the Atlassian Marketplace for a no-obligation trial. Or simply get in touch with us and make an appointment: The team will be happy to talk to you about your Jira template requirements and show you the solution in a practical demo session!
Further Reading
- 5 Reasons Why ITSM Teams Rely on Jira Service Management Data Center
- Atlassian Cloud Mythbusting Part 5: What Happens to my Data?
- Atlassian Cloud Mythbusting Part 1: What’s the Deal with Data Security?
- Atlassian Apps: More Transparency and Security for the Atlassian Marketplace
- More Security in the Atlassian Cloud: The Credential Invalidator Protects Against Account Takeovers by Stolen Session Cookies
