Adjusting Data Residency

[#1]

In this article, I'd like to show you how you can change where the data of your Atlassian Cloud instance is hosted.

Please note that this is possible for all new paid Cloud plans today and will be enabled for existing Cloud instances until October 2021 (see @RJ Gazarek's post for more details).

What to do before you move your data?

I'd recommend that you read through Atlassian's docs to understand what data can be pinned to a certain location. I'm intentionally not listing them here (to not have an outdated list in this post).

Please note that moving one of your Jira products will automatically move the other Jira products with the same base url as well since they're technically on the same instance.

For the move, you need to define a 24 hour move window. Atlassian will perform the migration in this timeframe. Please be aware that potentially in the whole move window, your instance won't be accessible.

How do you change it?

Please note that you need to be an organization admin in order to make these changes.

• Go to your Jira or Confluence instance
• Open the top left menu and select Administration
• In the top navigation menu, select Security
• On the left hand menu, select Data Residency
  
  

• On this page, you can see the currently configured location for each of your products.
• Click on Request Move for the product you want to change the location for.
• Select the new location for your data and move to the next screen.
• Enter the start time of your move window and move to the next screen.
• In the last step, review your selections and confirm your move request by submitting it.
• You'll get a success message that your move has been scheduled which will also be reflected in the table.
  

• Now you simply need to wait until your move window has passed.
• After your data has been moved, you'll see that it's pinned to a location (as the Confluence instance in my screenshot.

To see these steps in action, check out this visual guide:

[RJ Gazarek]

Thanks for this write-up! I'd like to open up the curtain on one thing.  

When you schedule a data residency migration with us (this is how it works today, we will be changing this behavior in September), our backend system does some checks looking at the amount of data you have in your product instance. If you have "too much" data, which basically is almost anything more than a brand new instance today, we call this a "risky" migration, and we open up a support ticket on your behalf - so that we can try to manually coordinate the migration. And in some cases, even with manual verification, we won't be able to safely move it until September.  If it's a fresh instance, the move will schedule automatically without any human intervention on our end. 

This is one of the reasons why we ask that you pin your instance to the region you want first, before adding data to it. :) 

We still have work to do to be able to safely move tenants of all sizes automatically, which is what we're working on for our next release in September, and why this isn't yet available to all existing customers in the cloud with data. 

If anyone has questions on the process, let me know!

Thanks again for the tutorial/guide!!

[Julia Dietlinger]

I tried to do this, but it says that no new data residency move requests are accepted. Any timeline on when this will be resolved?

Thanks!

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

@RJ Gazarek - are you able to provide more information to Julia. And maybe add more information to the banner in your data residency documentation?

[Matthias Limbacher]

@RJ Gazarek So does that mean that if I create a new instance now, it will be possible to move data residency as long as the instance is empty regardless of the currently shown banner "We’re temporarily not accepting new move requests" at your documentation? 

I'm currently planning an introduction of Jira at my workplace which I can only continue to do if data residency is at least EU. 

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

@Matthias Limbacher - I've flagged this topic to the Atlassian Community Managers so that they can trace down an answer for you.

[Julia Dietlinger]

@Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ This would also be important for me to know :) Thanks a lot for a calrification!