Security Governance: How to keep operational data both protected and productive?

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For thousands of organizations, especially those in highly regulated industries like healthcare providers, biotech companies, and life sciences organizations, Jira Service Management has transitioned from a simple ticketing tool into the organization's collective operational memory. It is the central hub for incidents, service delivery, and workflows. The more central Jira becomes, the more valuable its data grows. 

And let’s not forget that data is one of the most valuable assets any organization owns. Assets, services, contracts, equipment, compliance records — when the data behind them becomes unavailable or inaccessible, operations stop, and it can lead to serious consequences. 

Yet, most IT leaders treat data risk as two completely separate problems. Cybersecurity teams work tirelessly to juggle protecting data from accidental deletion or any other events of failure and meeting compliance regulations, like HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc. Meanwhile, the clinical, facilities, and technical teams who need that data most struggle to access it, resorting to risky spreadsheet exports or simply flying blind.

The result? Data that is securely protected but unproductive. Or, vice versa, highly productive copies of data floating around that nobody is protecting.

True security governance means stopping the compromise. It requires an operational backbone where data is simultaneously protected against loss and instantly accessible to the people who need it.

That  means every IT leader should be able to answer two questions:

1. What happens if this data is lost?
2. Who can actually use it right now?

This article takes them in order; in a practical example, we will look at how a company operating in the healthcare industry can bridge those two gaps between data protection using GitProtect backup & restore and data productivity using Starhive asset management. 

Let’s set the scene…

A company that operates in the healthcare industry, while undergoing a strict compliance audit, uncovered a critical data governance gap that threatened both its regulatory status and its operational continuity.

The company relied on Jira Service Management as its operational backbone, processing thousands of incidents, service requests, and medical asset workflows every month. However, they faced a dual dilemma:

1. The Protection Gap: They needed their critical JSM and Jira asset data to be completely secure and instantly recoverable in the event of ransomware, accidental deletion, etc.
2. The Productivity Gap: They needed this same data to be easy to access and use by clinical, technical, and facilities teams. Each team needed a clear, modern view of only the information relevant to their work, with the ability to check and update records from anywhere using Sites, mobile, and QR codes.

The challenges under the hood - risky ecosystem

Challenge 1: the growing cost of data loss

Operating in healthcare meant the company is a prime target for cybercriminals.

➡️ Hacking and IT incidents accounted for more than 80% of large healthcare data breaches in 2025 (the HIPAA Journal)

➡️ Ransomware alone affected 67% of healthcare organizations, driving nearly half of all confirmed healthcare breaches.

➡️ The financial stakes were staggering, with the average cost of a healthcare data breach climbing to $7.42 million.

Compounding this risk was the rapid adoption of internal AI tools, as they can help automate a number of manual tasks — according to Atlassian's State of AI in Service Management Report 2025, AI-driven efficiencies help organizations save 34% of their time. However, AI brings a risk of data loss - according to the 2026 DevOps Threats Unwrapped report, AI-enabled applications as an emerging attack vector capable of unintentionally exposing sensitive organizational data.

Moreover, taking into account the Shared Responsibility Model, the company realized that Atlassian protects the platform infrastructure, but data recovery is not automatically guaranteed — it’s the responsibility of a customer. If a project or asset registry vanished, the responsibility fell entirely on the company.

Challenge 2: the productivity bottleneck

While IT ensured all the data is protected, the teams closest to the medical assets (clinical staff and health professionals, biomedical engineers, etc.) could be blocked from using it. To bypass this, the company fell into three dangerous, industry-standard workarounds:

➡️ IT staff exported manual spreadsheets on request, creating unprotected, siloed copies of sensitive data.

➡️ IT staff relied on fragmented point tools to give each team a tailored view of the same assets, but this created duplicated data across disconnected systems.

➡️ Teams furthest from IT simply went without the data they needed.

This friction is exactly why CMDBs often fail to deliver their expected value. According to Gartner, only 29% of Gartner clients report achieving the value they expect from their CMDBs. The issue is not only data accuracy. It is that many CMDBs are still built around technical assets and infrastructure layers, without enough connection to service portfolios, digital services, user groups, and business context. As a result, the CMDB may contain important data, but the people who depend on that data cannot easily understand how it relates to the services, assets, and work they are responsible for.

The solution comes with a 2-pronged architecture

To achieve true data governance, the organization implemented a unified strategy to make its operational data simultaneously protected and productive.

1 — data protection and security with GitProtect

To protect against data loss and meet stringent compliance protocols, the company deployed GitProtect backup and recovery software for Jira Service Management. This eliminated the "recovery experiment" in the event of failure, replacing it with a predictable, automated security strategy offering. With the backup solution, they received:

✅ Automated granular scheduled backups, which can be executed within the company’s needs and requirements to minimize data loss windows. Thus, the company can decide what to protect and how often to have a copy done. For example, it can have a backup copy of their most critical JSM data every 4 hours, and other data can be protected more rarely. 

✅ Backup to multiple storage destinations, including both cloud and on-premises locations. Thus, the organization manages to meet the industry-recognized 3-2-1 backup rule and ensures that in any event of failure, like data deletion, it can restore its JSM data, including Jira Assets.

✅ Long-term data retention that allows organizations to keep backed-up data for months, years, or indefinitely, not just the standard 30-day retention common among many SaaS services. Thus, the company can satisfy legal and healthcare audit histories.

✅ Ransomware protection and encryption — with the backup solution, the company can keep its Jira data in WORM-compliant storage, set the in-flight and at-rest encryption level for its backups, including AES, AES-GCM, or its own encryption key.

✅ Data residency of choice as with the GitProtect backup, the company can choose where to store its backed-up data (to meet compliance requirements).

✅ Regular recovery testing, which allows the organization to validate its Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives before an incident occurs.

✅ Flexible restoration options, which allow the organization to restore its Jira data to the original instance or to a completely new instance, regardless of geographic region.

2 — data productivity with Starhive

With the foundation secured, the company implemented Starhive as its CMDB and asset management platform for medical and IT equipment alongside JSM to break down data silos.

✅ On the Service Desk: When a medical device incident is logged, JSM agents instantly view the device's owner, real-time location, and service history directly within the submitted incident, dynamically pulled from Starhive, a single source of truth rather than a stale spreadsheet.

✅ Beyond the Service Desk (The Starhive Site): Clinical staff and healthcare professionals can be directed straight to the equipment data relevant to their work through a simplified Starhive Site interface tailored to their role. From a single interface, they can view, comment on, update, or create records, while built-in permissions ensure they only access and modify the information relevant to their responsibilities.

✅ At the Asset Location: A technician standing next to a malfunctioning ventilator simply scans its QR code to open the asset record and updates the asset information on the spot. Because the information can be updated immediately while the work is being carried out, data remains accurate and up to date.

✅ Precise Control & Audit Readiness: Using role-based permissions on a single dataset ensures that biomedical engineers get notified of maintenance updates, clinical staff can check the availability and location of equipment, and compliance auditors review exact change histories.

The outcome that matches the needs

By using GitProtect and Starhive, the company successfully manages to protect its data without sacrificing its data productivity. Moreover, it manages to check all five boxes of comprehensive data governance to ensure that operational data:

• Protected against loss -> The company has automated scheduled backups and the possibility to restore its backups under any circumstances.
• Governed with the right security measures -> Granular backups, data residency of choice, encryption, and ransomware protection.
• Accessible to the people who need it in a way they prefer to use it -> Starhive Sites give clinical staff and health professionals their own simple, branded portals, each shaped around the information the teams need.
• Trusted as a single source of truth -> unified  CMDB connected to JSM, where every asset exists once, stays up to date, and is securely shared across teams. 
• Easy to update where work actually happens -> Mobile access and QR code scanning make it easier to update asset information at the point of work.

Protection without productivity is a vault. Productivity without protection is a liability. Governance — real governance — is both. It isn't about restricting access; it's about enabling trusted access.

Try Starhive asset management on Atlassian Marketplace

Try GitProtect backup and restore on Atlassian Marketplace

The article is written in collaboration between Starhive and GitProtect.

[Elena_Elevatic]

@Daria Kulikova_GitProtect_io Love the "vault vs. liability" framing — protection and accessibility shouldn't be a trade-off. Real governance is enabling trusted, secure and usable access. Great read!

[Viswanathan Ramachandran]

 Hi @Daria Kulikova_GitProtect_io 

Good points and it is well practically framed and actionably relevance to modern SaaS. 

My Viewpoints (How to actually achieve this balance):
To keep data both highly secure and highly productive, organisations should focus on three practical principles:

1. Context-Aware, Just-In-Time Access: Moving away from static permissions. Security shouldn't mean permanently blocking access; it means using automated governance tools that grant data access dynamically based on user context, project status, and real-time need.
2. Guardrails, Not Gates: Instead of blocking users with heavy approval workflows, embed security directly into the tools they use. For example, use automated data loss prevention (DLP) that flags or masks sensitive data (like API keys or PII) in real-time, allowing teams to keep collaborating without manual security reviews.
3. Data Classification at Birth: Productivity stalls when users don't know what is safe to share. By implementing automated labelling (e.g., Public, Internal, Confidential) directly at the creation level, you empower teams to move fast because the rules for how that data can move are already baked in.