Announcing Data Residency for Standard and Premium licenses

[#1]

Update: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Data-Residency-Comes-to-Australia-amp-Update-on-Data-Residency/ba-p/1825538

We have just released data residency for Australia and will start turning on Data Residency for all existing Standard/Premium customers starting Oct 15th, with a phased rollout.  View the post above for more information!

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TL;DR In February of 2021 we announced our plans to make data residency available to more customers later this year. We have now begun our phased rollout of data residency for Standard and Premium licenses. Read on for more!

Hi Team!

Last year we introduced Data Residency for our Enteprise plan customers, for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management. Since then, we received a resounding amount of feedback on how important this feature was to customers on our Standard and Premium plans - and so we got to work. Naturally, this makes sense to us. Regulations and internal policy requirements don’t usually care how big your company is or how many users you have on Atlassian's products - so it was the right thing to do to bring this to all of our customers as quickly as we could.

In February of this year, we briefly announced our plans to provide customers of all sizes with greater control over their data by making data residency available for all customers. Offering this to a much larger audience, many of which have data in our cloud already that we would have to move around the world, is not an easy task. We also had to figure out if we would charge for this capability, and how much. In the end, we realized that this was a table-stakes feature that our customers needed and shouldn’t be charged for.

I’m excited to share an update that we’ve begun our phased rollout of data residency to new and existing cloud licenses for Standard and Premium for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management at no additional cost.

We are rolling out data residency in phases to ensure our platform and products remain stable and high performing for our cloud customers. This means:

• New cloud subscriptions created on or after Jun 30, 2021 will have data residency turned on and available for use.

• Existing cloud subscriptions will have data residency turned on for use by October 2021.

Please note, you will not receive a notification once data residency is enabled for your license(s). We recommend checking your admin hub at admin.atlassian.com to confirm whether you can start using data residency capabilities.

This is a huge milestone in supporting the compliance needs of our customers and giving you more flexibility and control over where your data is stored.

For details on key dates and information, see our FAQs below. To get started on your cloud journey, start your free cloud migration trial and explore data residency, cloud features, and more for the remaining duration of your server or Data Center maintenance - for up to 12 months.

Yes, but who are you?

For those who don’t know me yet, or haven’t been following our Data Residency work, my name’s RJ and I’m a product manager on the cloud platform team responsible for all things Data Residency. So if you have questions, comments, feedback, or requests - I’d love to hear from you! You can drop a comment here, email me directly at rgazarek@atlassian.com, or join our closed group on all things Cloud - Security & Compliance.

What is data residency again?

As a refresher, data residency lets organizations ensure their product content, such as Jira issues, Confluence pages, comments, and attachments are permanently stored within a selected location (today those locations are the US or the EU locations). Each location is supported by one or more AWS Regions.

• US: US-East & US-West

• EU: Frankfurt, Germany & Dublin, Ireland

• AU: Sydney, Australia

What locations will be available once data residency is enabled?

Currently, you can pin your primary product data to our US and EU locations, but we are working on adding additional locations.

• Canada: Q2 2022

• United Kingdom: Q2 2022

• Japan: Q2 2022

To stay up to date on when these locations will be available, bookmark our cloud roadmap.

What types of data can I pin to a specific location?

Primary product data includes User Generated Content like Jira issues and Confluence pages. For a full list of what data can be pinned, visit our documentation here.

How do I enable this on my Standard or Premium licenses?

The ability to use our data residency feature will automatically be enabled on your site for new instances created after June 30, 2021, and for existing instances in September, 2021.

Once it’s available,

1. Visit your admin hub at admin.atlassian.com

2. Go to Security > Data residency

3. In the data residency table, you will see each of your products, and if Data Residency is available, you will see a “Request Move” button. Click that and follow the walkthrough to schedule your data residency migration.

[Patricia Francezi]

HI @RJ Gazarek are there any plans to add more locations?

Admins from Brazil are concerned about it. 
Roadmap just points the location you already mentioned until Q2 - 2022

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi @Patricia Francezi 

For now the locations on our roadmap are the ones we're committed to delivering based on customer demand, as those are the highest.  A few other we are continuing to keep an eye on are India, Brazil, Singapore, and Korea.  However, we're not seeing the customer demand yet for those regions.  In any event, even if we decided to add more, it wouldn't happen until after Q2 - 2022, as our resources are limited and we have just enough to deliver on those regions today (even then we're on a pretty tight timeline). 

If/when we announce new regions, I'll update the roadmap and the community with a new post highlighting the additions.  

I hope that helps! 

[Carlos Faddul]

But in August 2021 (this year), Brazil will start to have fines under our data protection laws (LGPD) (similar to GDPR), I believe this could be a negative impact if we wait at least another year to define the Data Residency, since Jira Server is no longer sold and most national companies would be medium-sized, which would not include the use of a DataCenter and/or would have infrastructure to support the use of a tool .
This is a point that tends to be negative in Jira compared to any other market tool, since if the company is adapting/suitable for the LGPD, this could create impediments for the Data Protection Officer (DPO) in some legal contracts.

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi @Carlos Faddul ! 

Thanks for the comment, good to see you!  I do know those protection laws are coming into play, and it's something we're keeping a close eye on.  Unfortunately, right now, it does just come down to resources and time.  If we could do Brazil earlier, we would, but we are at our maximum capacity. 

We'll be adding more locations most likely in the second half of 2022 - but we're currently working on getting through the 4 new locations we have planned through the first half of 2022 (Canada, UK, Japan, and Australia). 

For the second half of 2022, we're looking at which of the following we need to do next: Brazil, India, Singapore, and Korea - and will have to make the same tradeoffs between those 4 areas as well. 

I know that's not the answer you wanted to hear, and we'll continue to keep an eye on this, I promise! 

[Romain VELON]

Hello @RJ Gazarek

Thank you for this really good news. I know you already talked about the next new locations but I'd like Atlassian to consider France as a location as well. 

Many of our customers have huge security requirements in terms of data residency and France is their only option, especially public sector or government entities. With Server, they were able to manage it by their own. Now they need to migrate, either they go to Data Center but are limited in terms of users (500 minimum for Software), either they quit Atlassian. And we don't want it as you don't want it. That's the case also with new clients: Atlassian is not in a good place when comparing to other similar tools.

Thank you.

Romain

[Greg Wenden]

H, @RJ Gazarek it's good to hear the progress which is being made.

I signed up for the migration trial but haven't moved our instance of JIRA to the Cloud yet. Is it possible to stop it and restart it so that we are able to benefit from this new functionality without having to wait until October?

We won't be doing the actual migration for another month and I'd like to benefit from the new data residency selection as soon as possible.

Thanks,

Greg

[Jack Brickey]

Another good example of your commitment to the Cloud. Keep it up!

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi @Romain VELON !

So we do have the EU data residency option, which in talking to customers satisfies the majority of our customers in the countries in the EU.  With that said, we do hear about some special cases where a specific country, even though being part of the EU, doesn't want their data in Germany or Ireland. 

With that said, for France, could you point me to what the reason is for France needing to maintain the data within France even though they're part of the EU? Are there specific regulations I can read so I can learn more?

Thanks!

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi @Greg Wenden !

Yes! You should be able to do that, just delete your instance, and start a fresh one - and Data Residency option will be available to you.  We highly recommend that you turn data residency on before you move your data into the cloud. 

[Romain VELON]

Thank you @RJ Gazarek  for your quick answer. 

When we receive "Request for Proposals" from our clients they put Data residency as a requirement to choose the right tool. Europe is not like US, we are really different countries with different laws. You can imagine that our French Ministry of Defense doesn't want their data to be located in Germany. Same for companies in the industry (electricity providers, nuclear providers, transport, Health...) because there are a lot of concurrence in other countries. 

We have clients (I don't want to name them here) using JIRA Server right now. They cannot afford DataCenter prices. Cloud is not an option because of data residency outside of France so they consider to leave Atlassian. 

One extract from one proposal (in French). What is in bold means "Hosting must phisycally be on metropole territory" (metropole = France)

On that website about data for Health industry: https://www.senat.fr/leg/exposes-des-motifs/ppr19-576-expose.html it is written "Comme l'a fait remarquer le Conseil d'État dans sa décision du 19 juin 20201(*) sur le Health Data Hub, les données de santé hébergées par Microsoft doivent actuellement être domiciliées en France". 

It means that our Senate wants Health data to be hosted in France

Thank you for your consideration

Romain

[RJ Gazarek]

Thanks @Romain VELON for the additional details! 

When we talk to some of our customers in countries other than Germany, we largely hear the same response. As long as the data is hosted somewhere within the European Union, that generally is acceptable since the EU has data agreements between each country. 

However, I can understand why in some cases, this may not be true and a specific country wants specific data held within their country only.  

If you'd like to share with me more specific details about your customers who are requiring France as an option for Data Residency, feel free to email me at rgazarek@atlassian.com

[Flora Rubio [DEISER]]

Hi @RJ Gazarek

As Data residency in Europe is supposed to be available in October for Standard and Premium, do you have more details on the specific date? Our team is currently working on several Cloud migration  and we absolutely need this feature to be able to finish our work. 

Thank you for helping!

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi @Flora Rubio [DEISER] !

I've got a new update coming out tomorrow on this, along with one other Data Residency item, which I'll link back here.  Long and short is, we're going to start turning this on for customers in about 1.5 weeks.  However, due to the sheer volume of customers and data in our cloud right now, we need to roll this out in a phased approach.  Which will take us a couple of months to get to everyone we're estimating.  With that said, right now, if any customer needs this urgently they can open up a support ticket and request us to schedule the migration manually for them. Otherwise, if they can wait, that would be great!

[Sen Xu]

Hi @RJ ,

I have recently purchased 500 premium license of JIRA software + ACCESS for my company and I don't see any "security" or "data residency" option in admin.atlassian.net. The license is newly purchased in October 2021.

https://admin.atlassian.com/ shows just the two product of "JIRA software" and "Atlassian ACCESS". the "JIRA software" option has "manage group" "manage product access" "view billing" from the hamburger icon.

Please advice.

[RJ Gazarek]

@Sen Xu from that screen, you have to click into your organization. So just click on the name of your org, and it'll take you into AdminHub where you can manage settings for all products under that organization. 

[Lorenzzi Viana Bassoto]

We need need Data Residency in Brazil ASAP! A lot of companies have the cloud migration planned, but have halted the projects thanks to the lack of data residency and LGPD, our data legislation.

[심영경]

클라우드 기술은 너무 세분화되어 있어  초보자들도 쉽게 접할 수 있는 활용기술 있을까요~???^^

[Julian Bolton]

@RJ Gazarek Hi, can you advise how to raise a support ticket for a migration please? I was hitting dead ends from the links privided in the Data Residency info.

We are at risk of losing a customer because of our current data residency.

Many thanks