Help your teams scale responsibly:Jira Software 9.0 & Jira Service Management 5.0 are now available!

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Hey there, Data Center community! I'm Roman Kolosovskiy and I am one of the Product Managers for Jira DC. I’m excited to share that Jira Software 9.0 and Jira Service Management 5.0 are now available. This platform release helps your enterprise team scale responsibly, empowering confident growth without sacrificing performance.

As you know, platform releases drive significant value as they allow us to include multiple backward-incompatible changes (or “breaking changes”) which establish a foundation for continuous improvement in future releases. Read on to explore the three key benefits of Jira’s most recent platform release: security, performance, and automation. For even more information, please check out the release notes linked at the bottom of this post.

Enhanced security

To ensure that Jira’s security keeps pace with your growing enterprise, this new release targets known opportunities for security enhancements to offer a strong, stable platform for continued growth. These updates, along with those detailed in the release notes, create our most secure Jira Software to date.

• Platform 6 in Jira Software 9.0 and Jira Service Management 5.0 upgrades our stack of third-party dependencies and resolves technical debts
• XSRF protection improvements keep your instance(s) secure
• Restricted anonymous access to REST endpoints ensure you retain control
• Java API deprecations and removals give your team the latest in IT security

Optimized performance

When your team relies on Jira, every slowdown, no matter how small, means wasted resources and frustrates everyone from the user to the stakeholder. To keep your instance running smoothly, we’ve optimized Jira’s performance through several features, including:

• Safeguards for comments, ensuring that the number of comments on an issue does not slow the page load
• Deferred scripts help pages load faster by allowing certain page assets to load after the page itself has loaded
• Issue view improvements enhance the issue view experience, the time needed to create comments, edit issues, how you view the dashboard, and more

Look forward to expanded Safeguard capabilities coming in the future!

Native automation

We are excited to share that with this release, Automation for Jira (A4J) will be included as native functionality in Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center. Users who are not yet upgraded to Jira Software 9.0 can now access A4J as a free marketplace app, meaning as long as you are on a supported Jira Data Center license, you can leverage the app at no cost until you upgrade to Jira 9.0 or later. This means all Jira users can now take advantage of great automation benefits such as:

• Synchronizing parent and sub-tasks, smart auto-assigning, tracking SLAs, automated acting on linked issues, and more
• Smoothly automated advanced processes like approval workflows or defect management
• Seamless communication between separate instances and integration with other tools using available webhooks-based triggers

To further boost your automation and workflow capabilities, Jira Service Management 5.0 will also see improved SLA automation and a new interface for end-users. Jira Service Management 5.0 enhances the way SLAs are calculated to drive better consistency, scalability, and reliability. As a result, SLAs can process faster, automatically notifying responsible parties as soon as work needs to be done.

We know many of you are excited to upgrade, and I encourage you to stay tuned as we communicate details about our next Long-Term Support (LTS) for Jira later this year. We are targeting FY22 Q4 for 9.0’s first long-term support release. To learn more about Jira Software 9.0, or Jira Service Management 5.0, check out the release notes:

Jira Software 9.0 release notes

Jira Service Management 5.0 release notes

Thanks for being part of our Data Center community and please share any questions or comments below! In the meantime, you can head over here to download the latest copy.