Update on Atlassian cloud data residency - July 2022

[#1]

Hi everyone,

We are grateful for your patience and apologize for the delay in providing an update on our data residency offering. I’m pleased to share the actions we’ve taken to date to improve the scalability and reliability and a timeline for future improvements:

What has happened since our last update?

• We’ve worked hard to ensure that customers that have contacted our support team directly with urgent requests could be actioned. We’ve been able to help 450 customers set up 1,150 products for data residency.

• We have increased sevenfold our capacity for processing data residency data moves across our cloud regions, and we are working to add even more capacity.

• We have reduced the downtime required for the migration process in the majority of cases.

• Finally, we’ve focused on improving our scheduling and error handling tooling, to make sure that the process succeeds much more reliably and we don’t have to reschedule data moves multiple times.

Thanks to these actions and many others, we are ready to open data residency requests through admin.atlassian.com once again. We intend to do this progressively to ensure the most reliable experience possible.

Next Steps:

• Beginning late August we will be start enabling self service requests. This will be based on the amount of data in the instance, beginning with customers with the least amount of data that can be moved quickly. This enables us to run these moves in the established maintenance windows. The speed at which we make this available to customers will be throttled up or down based on observed results.

• In parallel we are working on improving the UI so that customers that can accept downtime in a shorter timeframe with no notice (generally, customers migrating to cloud that are not yet actively using their cloud instance) can request migration. We don’t have a specific release date for this yet, but we are aiming to make it available around mid Q4 of 2022.

• For now, if you require data residency and do not have the ability to enable it on admin.atlassian.com, or you absolutely require specific date and times for the associated downtime, please contact our support team to assist with manually enabling data residency. Priority will be given to customers that are in the process of migrating from Atlassian server and Data Center products to cloud.

FAQ

It is already late August and I don’t see data residency self service enabled for my products yet, what should I do?

Contact our support team for assistnace with manually enabling data residency. Priority will be given to customers that are in the process of migrating from Atlassian server and Data Center products to cloud.

How can I ensure that my cloud products can have data residency enabled sooner?

We strongly recommend enabling data residency before you start actively using your cloud product. Less (or no) data means less downtime, and it allows your downtime to be scheduled on weekdays when we have significantly more capacity.

Will enabling data residency improve my product’s performance?

Data residency is not intended to improve product performance and we strongly discourage enabling data residency to try to improve product performance. Our cloud architecture is designed to deliver consistent performance globally, and we are investing significantly across our products in improving performance. We do not recommend enabling data residency to improve performance.

[Jimmy Seddon]

Thanks for the update @Dave Meyer!

[Alex Janes]

"If you are prevented from using Atlassian cloud products due to a data residency requirement, contact our support team to assist with manually enabling data residency. Priority will be given to customers that are in the process of migrating from Atlassian server and Data Center products to cloud."

So, priority is given to new recurring revenue, instead of existing revenue? I could be wrong. But I don't see any other way to read this...

[Jimmy Seddon]

@Alex Janes that is one way to interpret it.  However, reading the next paragraph:

"We strongly recommend enabling data residency before you start actively using your cloud product. Less (or no) data means less downtime, and it allows your downtime to be scheduled on weekdays when we have significantly more capacity."

Indicates they are prioritizing those customer that pose less risk and have a smaller downtime impact first, vs those that will require more planning and scheduling.

🤷

[Florian Franke]

Any news when this will be possible again?

[R.]

Please, we need an update on this! It's business critical, if not we have to cancel our cooperation! That no way you can handle with customer in the eu - it's a complete breach! @Dave Meyer 

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @Rasmus Breyer @Florian Franke ,

I understand your frustration and sincerely apologize on behalf of Atlassian. We're working as quickly as possible to improve the capacity of the systems in question while also processing as many Data Residency requests as possible on an exception basis. If you need an exception, please contact our support team and we can work with you.

@Alex Janes your question is a fair one, and I want to be transparent. A significant piece is exactly what @Jimmy Seddon said – there's more flexibility with an empty tenant that's not actively used versus a tenant with a lot of data and daily usage. In addition, what we typically see is that customers that were already using our cloud products prior to the availability of data residency that now wish to enable it are doing so in response to a change in their business requirements or a decision to apply stricter compliance rules.

On the other hand, customers that are migrating from our on-premises products to our cloud service usually are already under strict requirements and cannot start moving any data to our cloud until data residency is enabled. Migrating from on-premises to cloud often takes substantial planning, testing, and change management on behalf of our customers and is scheduled carefully to minimize disruption.

Simply put, there's usually more flexibility on when data residency is enabled for customers that are already using our cloud products than those who are migrating. That said, this is not an ironclad rule and we prioritize all exception requests on a case-by-case basis.

Obviously, this is not the state that we want to be in long term. We have a goal to provide the most frictionless experience possible for data residency, and we're not meeting it today. I take personal responsibility and our team is working as hard as possible to address the situation.

[Florian Franke]

Hey @Dave Meyer ,

thank you very much for the detailed explanation and the insights. It's not hypercritical for us, but we need it in the not too distant future (this year). I'll keep monitor this article. If there's an update from time to time: Great.

Thanks!
Florian

[Martin Kaul]

"We strongly recommend enabling data residency before you start actively using your cloud product." 

That sounds funny, yes we need to pin the data to Europe. We bought the Jira cloud and start now to ramp up the usage of Jira. Best time to perform the data residency - but it is not available. 

It makes no sense for us to wait using Jira and to create data in Jira, i.e. as a result, when data residency is available again, we created data in Jira.

Best regards
  Martin

[Marco Wunderlin]

Hi @Dave Meyer Thanks for clarification. 

Can you please clarify a little bit more what you mean with "...tenant with a lot of data and daily usage...". What is a lot of data in GB?
And second question, out of your experience, how long it takes to move a certain amount of data.

That would help me to understand how feasible it is to move our tenant and how long we have to estimate a downtime. As I believe we do not have a lot of data.

Thanks, Marco

[John Bogoev]

Hi @Dave Meyer ,

Further to the comments from @Marco Wunderlin would it help if we were to delete unnecessary data to reduce the size of our migration? For example we have video's attached to tickets which we are happy to delete.

Regards,

John

[MartinHerren]

@Dave Meyerwe are currently planning our Server -> Cloud migration. We don't have any valuable data in the Cloud yet as we did only some test migration of some very light dummy projects to try things out and identify problems (apps and other).
We are currently/yet not blocked by regulatory process nor is it urgent, still in this case wouldn't it be better to be able to pin the location before doing the migration, instead of first migrating to cloud and then move the data ?

[Dave Meyer]

@MartinHerren I understand the concern. We're making substantial progress and are planning to make data residency more widely available this month. If your production migration is coming up, feel free to contact our support team and we should be able to get it enabled for you relatively quickly.

[MartinHerren]

Thanks @Dave Meyer 
We are not blocked by this and is is not a problem to move the data later, it is just it will load your infra less if we migrate directly to the correct region.
As we will soonest do the migration end of June, more realitically mid-July, it is well possible we can set the region before finalizing the migration.

[Justin C]

Hello there,

is there any update to this? :) If possible I would like to move our data to another region before we migrate our data.

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @Justin C ,

We are working on an update to share next week. In the meantime, feel free to contact our support team and we will help you out.

Regards,

Dave

[Germain Gorisse]

Thanks @Dave Meyer , I had the same question at the same time as @Justin C .

FYI, as recommanded in the article's FAQ, I contacted your support team to request assistance with manually enabling data residency in Europe, which is a prerequisite for our deployment to the compagny (ticket CA-1878667).

Unfortunately, the ticket was closed with an answer basically repeating your announcment without taking consideration ofthe request. For a new site with quite no data/user, could you confirm us that your team would be able to move from Global location to a specific location, with an estimation of the delay for ticket completion ?

Thanks for your precious help, the matter is unfortunately a showstopper for my organisation. Germain 

[malgorzata.maszczynska]

Hello there, 

we are waiting for that for more than a year. 

Please advise when it would be possible to enable data residency in Europe?

Regards, Margo

[Fabian Dengel]

Hello @Dave Meyer 

Any chance you could follow-up on the promised update on the matter? Currently the lack of clarity on data residency is a major deterrent to moving to cloud especially for EU-based enterprise customers handling sensitive data.

Looking forward to your feedback and many thanks in advance,
Fabian

[Dave Meyer]

Hi everyone,

We've just posted an update on the availability of data residency. To reduce confusion, I've posted it as a replacement of the text of the original announcement. Thank you again for your patience as we worked to improve on what we know is a critical requirement for so many of our customers.

[Fabian Dengel]

Great news, thanks @Dave Meyer and team for the continued effort!

[Michael Ziegler]

hello !
we are planing to move our on-premises installation to the cloud.
can we decide at the beginning to have a choice where we want our data - residency?

[Filiberto Selvas]

Hello @Michael Ziegler ,

Given you are migrating you can reach out to support and ensure Data residency is set up for you prior to your data migration.

We are rolling out self service to all customers progressively. It will depend a lot on your Plan when you would receive it. My estimate, not comital, is that mid November all customers that have a new instance should have the capacity for self service. 

[Michael Ziegler]

Hi @Filiberto Selvas thx for the quick answer!

so in other words can you confirm, that when we start NOW planing with the migration and we decide our data residency must be in "Frankfurt" that our existing data will be migrated to this predefined Destination = EU = Frankfurt

sorry for bothering you but i need a clear statement for our CEO

[Barbara Gabriel]

Hello team

Any news about the timeline?

First you say "Beginning late August we will be start enabling self service requests."

then it says under FAQ

It is already late August and I don’t see data residency self service enabled for my products yet, what should I do?

Contact our support team for assistnace with manually enabling data residency. Priority will be given to customers that are in the process of migrating from Atlassian server and Data Center products to cloud.

Will there be any chance in data residency for Atlassian Access?

Or will it for every stay the Data only in USA?

[Michael Ziegler]

the question with regards data  residency for Atlassian Access is high prior topic as well for me?

to have a choice between stored in USA or EU?
is there any plan to make this happen?