Admin Deep Dive: Business Continuity

[Betty Sheu]

Hi admins,

Welcome to the Admin Deep Dive community post! This is the beginning of a bi-monthly series where we share practical tips and guidance to help you get the most value out of your Atlassian Administration experience. We’ll cover key admin focus areas, such as business continuity, safe change management, AI visibility, and more!

This edition will focus on business continuity, which is all about maintaining business functions across all business lines and quickly resuming them when the unexpected happens. I’m sure many of you would agree that an unplanned outage is more than just a productivity hit. In fact, it can expose your business to compliance issues and massive financial risks. Atlassian’s business continuity capabilities are how we help you stay ahead of those risks.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to protect your data, recover quickly, and give leadership and users the visibility they need using Backup & Restore and System Health. Let’s dive in!

🔖 Don’t want to miss out on future editions? Bookmark this Admin Essential Library, which we update as new Admin Digests and Admin Deep Dives are published.

🗞️ If you missed our latest July edition of the Admin Digest, check what's new and upcoming in Atlassian administration.

Backup & Restore

Atlassian Backup and Restore protects against user-initiated disruptions, including accidental deletion, data corruption, and misconfiguration, while supporting your internal and external compliance mandates. As part of the shared responsibility model, Atlassian ensures the reliability, security, privacy, and compliance of the Cloud platform, including disaster recovery in the event of infrastructure failures. But it does not cover risks originating within your organization.

Backup and Restore fills that gap, giving you policy control, governance, and self-service recovery tools to ensure app data is backed up for 30 days and that recoveries are typically completed within 12 hours, with data loss limited to no more than 24 hours.

Plan eligibility: Atlassian Backup and Restore is a paid add-on available on Premium or Enterprise annual plans for Jira, Jira Service Management, or Confluence. You need both organization admin and app admin permissions to setup and manage your backup policy. See pricing information.

How it works

From within Atlassian Administration, you can set up scheduled, automated backups in just a few clicks. Your backups are stored in Atlassian-owned storage and cover supported Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence entities, including product data, attachments, and user and group data. You can restore from any backup taken in the last 30 days yourself, saving time and getting your team back up and running without opening a support ticket.

Setup steps

1. Review What data is backed up and restored, and align your recovery plan with the data you want to protect.

2. Prepare your restore target by provisioning a dedicated empty site in the same organization and region as the source site.

3. In admin.atlassian.com, go to Data management → Backup and Restore, select the frequency of backup, and confirm that the backup completes successfully.

Backup and Restore best practices

1. Test your recovery plan by restoring a recent backup to the dedicated empty site, then verify that projects, spaces, permissions, attachments, and links work as expected.

2. Monitor and document each run, starting with a review of the backup and restore tables, backup health check, and audit log.

3. Keep status reports and restore test results available for audit and compliance reviews.

📹 Check out this video to see it in action.

Ready to get started with Backup and Restore? Reach out to your Atlassian account team or solution partner to add Backup and Restore.

System Health

System Health is a reliability-monitoring feature in Atlassian Administration that provides org admins with a personalized dashboard showing only the incidents that affect their organization. While status.atlassian.com reports every major outage to all customers regardless of impact, System Health surfaces site-level incident data, resolution progress, and 90-day history specific to your sites and apps. This helps you confirm impact more quickly, communicate clearly with stakeholders, and reduce unnecessary support escalations.

Plan eligibility: All cloud plans (Free, Standard, Premium, Enterprise). Included at no additional cost.

System Health best practices

1. Turn on automated email notifications in ‘Notification Settings’, so you're alerted the moment a confirmed incident affects your sites, rather than finding out from end users.

2. Use the 90-day incident history and postmortems to build recurring reliability reports for leadership and compliance reviews.

3. When an incident is confirmed, share the site-level scope and resolution timeline with your teams immediately so they can shift work to unaffected areas while resolution is in progress.

📹 Check out this video to learn more.

That’s a wrap for this month’s deep dive. We hope you found it helpful and are walking away with practical steps to maintain business continuity for your organization. Leave us a comment below if you have questions or have other topics you’d like to see in future editions!