From Myth to Reality: How Jira's Integrated Tools Optimize Productivity and Secure Your Data

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“Different strokes for different folks” – don’t you think this phrase can give birth to multiple myths related to productivity, security, or time management? When it comes to optimizing and improving workflows, teams can face different misconceptions that need to be debunked… And, here is a hint 💡, that’s what we are going to do in this article. 

 So, let’s jump into the journey of figuring out what is a myth and what is a reality 🕵️ ...

Myth #1: “I have Jira – I don’t need any add-ons”

There is no doubt that Jira provides a robust foundation for managing tasks, issues, and projects. Just to note – more than 300K companies have adopted Jira worldwide to optimize their work, which is a great proof of the platform's efficiency. Each team, whether big or small, can find a benefit in using Jira, including task management and bug tracking – the tool is useful for agile teams, PM teams, software development teams, DevOps teams, and product management teams. Moreover, Jira has been recognized as a 5-time leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning tools. 

Thus, the question “Why may I need any add-ons in Jira?” can pop up in your head. The answer is varied organizations’ needs. For example, different development teams can have unique workflows, reporting, integration, time-tracking, security, and compliance requirements. And Jira can meet all those organizations’ needs by allowing them to integrate different apps - on the Atlassian Marketplace there are more than 8K app listings. This once again proves the fact that Jira is aimed at helping teams to be more productive and efficient.

Myth #2: “I tried time tracking – but it mostly fails in collaborative projects”

Inefficient work time is a common pain for teams. As per the Accelo report, companies suffering from poor time tracking lose a lot of money – only US-based professional services firms are losing 59 million billable hours daily. Of the teams working on the same project, only 13.1% are able to capture and deliver more than 70% of the planned tasks every week. That’s not even a half 🐌… 

The bottom line is that collaborative projects require time usage oversight, nor is this something optional.

Source: Accelo

The common belief says that organizing and tracking are time robbers that take away the time that would otherwise be used to perform work. But the facts and practical cases indicate the opposite. 

For instance, McKinsey finds that when the workflow is organized, employees don’t waste time trying to find information or figure out what they need to do next, which makes them more productive. It’s a myth that proper time management and organization slow down the worker; in fact, they increase productivity by decreasing the mental workload. 

Time tracking is a handy instrument for your teamwork management. It can show whether they are using their time productively and make sure that everybody is pulling their weight. There are lots of benefits that come with it: employees don’t get burnt out easily, and become more responsible in their work and develop a sense of ownership. 

Jira has a time tracking feature where teams can record the time spent on the task – enter the time spent, track the remaining estimates, and view worklogs. The time tracking fields are integrated into Jira workflows, which means that it’s not an extra process to be done but a cohesive part of task creation.

Source: Atlassian Jira

However, the problem with time tracking in collaborative projects is the lack of visualization that could add value and provide digestible insights to managers. Some teams may need more – and here comes the concept of visual time planning. 

ActivityTimeline offers a visual time management interface that the team members will easily use to plan their work activities. The tool extends the functionality of the standard time tracking of Jira and presents a more detailed and visual manner as to how time is spent on different tasks and projects:

Source: ActivityTimeline Timesheet Progress

ActivityTimeline improves Jira time tracking capabilities with more detailed timesheets and worklogs. These are highly descriptive reports that enable managers to have a clear picture of the time spent on a certain task. You can see which tasks are likely to take much more time than required and where you should better reallocate resources.

Source: ActivityTimeline Detailed Team Timesheets

You may need to plan your team work ahead – and there’s no need to become an oracle 🔮 to accurately allocate time for tasks, but simply look how much time similar tasks took in the past. For that purpose, ActivityTimeline suggests its Planned vs. Actual Chart – a visual comparison of estimated and actually logged time. By applying filters by users, projects, epics or teams, you can detect time allocation problems easily and come up with the solution in future iterations. 

Source: ActivityTimeline Planned vs. Actual Chart

Myth #3: “I do manual backups – it is more than enough to protect my Jira account data against data loss”

The belief that manual backups are sufficient to protect Jira account data is… [drum roll 🥁] a common misconception. Well, manual backups can provide some level of data protection yet they are far from foolproof and can leave significant gaps in your data security strategy. At this point, it’s worth remembering why backup is a necessary security measure. Backup can help:

• minimize or eliminate data loss during the events of disaster, like ransomware attacks, accidental deletion, etc. (learn more from The State of DevOps Threats),

• ensure business continuity, as in the event of failure you will be able to restore your data immediately and continue working,

• meet the Atlassian Cloud Security Shared Responsibility Model, which defines the responsibilities of both parties, the service provider and the customer’s,

• keep up with security compliance regulations, like GDPR, ISO 27001, NIS 2, etc., to comply with which backup and Disaster Recovery are the must-haves.

Manual backups vs. Automated backups

So, why manual backups can’t be considered as a sufficient data protection measure? To answer this question, we need to look at this issue from a few different viewpoints…

Frequency of backup jobs & backup automation

First, what’s worth mentioning is that manual backups rely on human intervention. As a result, it can lead to the risk of inconsistency and human error. Let’s imagine the situation where you are overloaded with other tasks (it happens, right? We are all humans), is it easy to forget to perform a backup? Or assume that a backup is successful? Sure… 

Here we also shouldn’t forget that with the growth of your organization, your Jira instance will become more complex – thus, the time and effort required to perform manual backups will increase exponentially. In this case, even the most diligent IT teams can miss some steps that will lead to incomplete or outdated backups. Thus, if a disaster takes place, these gaps can lead to the difference between a quick recovery and a catastrophic data loss. 

On the contrary, if you have automated scheduled backups, your IT team may be sure that your backups are performed at a stated time with regular intervals. It will help you eliminate human error and ensure that you always have an up-to-date backup copy recoverable from any point in time.

Limited protection against modem threats & security challenges

Manual backups do not provide comprehensive protection against modern data loss scenarios, such as ransomware attacks, your infrastructure downtime, or accidental deletions. In this case, you only have a copy of your Jira instance, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to run it when there is a need. Moreover, with manual backups, you can’t recover only some specific Jira data, like a project or an issue, you will need to recover your entire Jira instance, often overwriting the existing one. 

Automated backup solutions, like GitProtect backup and Disaster Recovery software for Jira Cloud, provide additional features for your Jira data protection, including encryption at flight and at rest with your own encryption key, full data coverage, the possibility to back up to a few storage locations (to meet 3-2-1 backup rule), replication between storages, unlimited retention, ransomware protection, and Disaster Recovery technology with the opportunity to restore your Jira data granularly or fully from any point in time to the local machine, to the same or a new Jira account. Thus, in any event of a disaster, you will have a disaster recovery scenario: 

• in case of a ransomware attack, you can restore your Jira data from any point in time locally or to the same/new account. As your data is kept in WORM-compliant storage, the malware won’t infect all your data, so you will be able to restore your data from before the moment ransomware hits your Jira account.

• if you experience downtime, you can restore your Jira data immediately for your business continuity as well. Remember about the 3-2-1 backup rule? Within it, you have at least 3 backup copies in no less than 2 storage locations with one offsite. Since GitProtect is a multi-storage system, you can have as many backup storages as you want… and once the situation requires, you can restore your data from any point in time from any of the multiple backup copies.

• accidental deletion isn’t a challenge as well – a single project? an issue? With a backup and DR solution, you can restore your data granularly from any point in time and continue your work without interruption.

Let’s sum up with the best practices to build a reliable backup strategy for your Jira account data:

Source: Jira Backup Best Practices

Summary

Well, Jira is a powerful tool. However, dismissing the value of add-ons and apps can significantly limit its potential. Add-ons and integrations allow you to customize Jira to better fit your team’s needs – for example, enhance security, scale effectively, improve time-tracking, and integrate with other essential tools. 

Try GitProtect Backups for Jira (free for 14 days) or use it free for up to 10 users

Try ActivityTimeline for Jira for free during a 30-day trial period

This article is a joint effort between Reliex and GitProtect – we are happy to share our combined knowledge with you.