What is the disaster recovery plan for OnDemand?

[Robert Patton]

Hello,

Can anyone point me to information about disaster recovery for the OnDemand solutions available? What is the recovery point objective, return to operations time, how often is it tested etc. Thanks!

[twong_atlassian · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert,

To summarize and handwave a ton:

If a meteor were to strike our datacenter and turn it into a smoking crater, we would rely on offsite tapes. These tapes are at worst, 7 days old, so there would be some data loss. Your site would remain offline while we work out the smoking crater problem, but we definately would be looking at getting a secondary infrastructure up as soon as possible for all of our customers. There would be many sleepless nights and gnashing of teeth.

From a more formal standpoint, I cannot give you a return to operations time in the event of catestrophic site failure.

For anything less than Ashburn being wiped off the face of the planet:

RTO : 24 h maximum worst case

RPO: 7 Days, off site backup

That being said, we are working on doing better than our current off site backups, and we're exploring possibilities of improving our resiliency to a DC loss, but I can't speak to those things at this point in time.

[Robert Patton]

Perfect, thanks! The question comes up because as we put more info and process into your products, it begins to fall under corporate standards requiring us to know about the DR plan, and be sure it exists. Among other things, Hurricane Katrina was an unfortunate lesson in how many of our vendors and partners did not have effective DR, and what a business impact that was. That said, at least you have the tapes to go off and hopefully that will be enough for us.

[Rowan Simpkin]

Hi Tim

I refer to your reply regarding DR which states in part "If a meteor were to strike our datacenter and turn it into a smoking crater, we would rely on offsite tapes. These tapes are at worst, 7 days old, so there would be some data loss."

Do you ever restore from these tapes as part of a DR testing/proving process to ensure the backups are good?

[Rowan Simpkin]

Hi Tim (or someone else at Atlasian who can answer)

Can I please get your response about whether you test restore your backup tapes. We may require you to do this on our behalf as a test exercise to satisfy our Business Continuity Plan.

[Jeff Curry]

I'm afraid we do not test restore procedures per customer request. However, I can confirm we routinely test our restore procedures for verification purposes.

If this is a requirement I can refer you to one of our Experts whom provide managed hosting of Atlassian products

[David Benson _draw_io_]

Now some time has passed is there some update on this? We have 2 cloud addons (Confluence and JIRA) and one of our security policies states that host vendors (Atlassian in this case) should have a published Data Recovery Plan (DRP) that we can review, or if not public, have been audited by an expert third-party and at least a summary of that audit by available. Given Atlassian's focus on Cloud, there must be a DRP by this now, could we get some information about it please?

[Hao La]

I want to second @David Benson question too. Can someone from Atlassian address that please? Also, who set the SLA for such activities?
Thank you

[Robert Patton]

To be as clear as I can, I am asking about the plan to recover from an extended data center outage in the primary OnDemand facility. That assumes there is a primary, versus multiple hot sites, but I have not seen anything indicating that is Atlassian's setup.

This is not about redundancy within a site, nor about backups and the ability to restore them if servers are unrepairably down.

This is about the "hurricane flattens the data center scenario" where OnDemand functionality has to be brought online somewhere else - San Jose, New York etc. This is a secondary site, not a 3rd location. Thanks!

[AmberF]

Hi Robert,

You can find information regarding our OnDemand backup/DR policy in our document About Your Data.

For a full list of OnDemand security resources see our Atlassian Information Security resources.

[Robert Patton]

Hi, thanks for the links, but unless I am missing something they address backups but not Disaster Recovery, meaning the loss of the Ashburn NTT data center due to natural disaster etc.

[Harry Chan]

This is probably true, but means your live instance AND the backup center's backup are both down due to disasters, which would be rare. It would be great maybe if Atlassian have a 3rd backup location, but not sure if it's worth it.

[David Chan]

The About Your Data link does not seem to work.  Where can we find info on OnDemand DR Policies?