A day earlier, Xhuljo Mezini stood on the same stage and made the case that your Jira and Bitbucket data is your responsibility, not your provider’s. If you read our write-up of that session, you already know the why. This is the how. His GitProtect colleague Michal Cheba took the Work Evolution Summit stage to move from the argument to the working plan, and to show what protecting your Atlassian stack actually looks like in practice. He opened by pointing back to Xhuljo’s talk on purpose, because the two sessions are two halves of one message. One builds the conviction. The other shows you what to do with it.
The Case, in Three Threats
Michal recapped the reasoning quickly, since Xhuljo had laid the foundation. Three threats make backup non-negotiable. The first is cyber attacks, and his framing was blunt: “they aren’t a matter of if, but rather when”,
Modern attacks do more than steal your data. They lock you out of it. The second threat is AI, which teams now deploy aggressively while handing it broad permissions and credentials, exactly the conditions under which an agent deletes or corrupts data it should never have touched. The third is the shared responsibility model that ran through Xhuljo’s talk too. SaaS providers like Atlassian and Microsoft take responsibility for the security of the cloud, not for the data you put into it. Michal pointed to Microsoft’s own terms, which disclaim liability for damages from lost data, use, or profits. That is why backup and compliance now travel together. If you need ISO 27001, if you are heading for SOC 2 Type 2, or if you simply have audits to pass, protecting your cloud environments stops being optional.
What a Month Without Jira Costs
Where Xhuljo asked how long your company could work without Jira, Michal answered with a number. In late 2024, Jaguar Land Rover suffered a breach in which Jira credentials leaked, exposing internal documentation and employee data. The company had to halt IT operations for a month, and by its own public account the shutdown cost around 890 million dollars. Sit with that figure the next time backup feels like a line item you can defer. The question is not whether you can afford to protect your Jira. It is whether you can afford the month without it.
What to Look For in a Backup System
The most useful part of Michal’s session was the checklist he gave you for evaluating any backup tool, not only his own. Start with the softer factor, a friendly interface that makes it easy to set up a plan and choose where the data goes. Then work through the serious criteria. Deployment options, meaning how easily the system scales across an entire Jira site. Data coverage, meaning whether the backup captures only work items and comments or the full context of your work. Storage, meaning whether you can choose between cloud and local. Scheduler and retention, meaning how often you can run copies, whether incremental backups are supported, and crucially for compliance, how long you can keep your data. Encryption, and specifically key management, which he framed memorably.
“who holds the key to the kingdom of my data”
Then alerting, so you are notified of problems rather than hunting for bad news, and finally easy recovery, meaning whether you can restore granularly rather than only as a full image. Keep that list. It is a fair yardstick for any vendor you consider.
GitProtect in Action
Michal then ran the demo against his own checklist. The dashboard gives a quick read on integrated resources and recent backup health, and an automated SLA export lets you prove to an auditor that your environment is protected. When you configure a plan, you can protect every Jira space at once or select specific projects, and larger organizations can split resources across multiple plans so the most critical projects get backed up more often. Trying to back up 200 spaces in a single day is not realistic, so that granularity matters. On coverage, GitProtect captures more than 100 types of elements to preserve the full context of your work, with the honest caveat that Atlassian’s API does not expose absolutely everything, so you should check the scope against your own requirements.
Storage comes three ways. You can use GitProtect’s own unlimited storage with immutability and custom data residency across Europe, the US, and Australia, so a team required to keep all data transfer inside Europe can do exactly that. You can bring your own storage, whether that is AWS S3, Azure Blob, Wasabi, Google Cloud, any S3-compatible option, or local SMB and NFS shares. And you can combine several, which satisfies the 3-2-1 rule of three copies across two locations with one kept off site. On retention, Michal drew a sharp contrast with Atlassian’s native 30-day limit by offering unlimited retention or a policy set by time, which is what enterprise compliance actually demands. Encryption supports your own key, applied at source and in flight, and notifications run through email, Slack, and webhooks today, with SIEM integration on the roadmap this year.
Recovery is where the tool earned its name. You restore per site, pick a backup plan and a point in time, roll back as far as the very first copy if you need to, and restore to the same organization or a different one. You can run a full disaster recovery of every project with its metadata, or granularly pull back individual issues, attachments, workflows, asset schemas, and automation rules. Repository restore even works across platforms, and Michal demonstrated moving a repository from Azure DevOps into Bitbucket. That same cross-restore ability doubles as a way to spin up a sandbox, so you can test a third-party Marketplace app safely before touching production.
The Detail That Matters Most
The single design choice worth remembering came up in the demo and again in the questions.
“GitProtect never overwrites the data. So we always create a new resource”.
Restore never puts your production at risk, because the tool always creates something new rather than overwriting what exists. An attendee pushed on the mechanics, asking what happens to issue IDs. Michal explained that restoring an entire project to a fresh site preserves the links and the original IDs, and when you restore into a site where those keys already exist, GitProtect assigns new keys while keeping every original issue ID in a custom field, so you can always trace a restored item back to its source. Another attendee asked the question that keeps backup admins up at night, whether a backup can silently fail and only reveal itself when you try to restore. The answer was no. Warnings and failures trigger notifications through email, Slack, or webhooks, and configurable daily reports cover the whole instance, so you never discover a bad backup at the worst possible moment. Michal also confirmed that GitProtect already covers the full Atlassian stack in the cloud, including Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Bitbucket.
Put the two sessions side by side and the pairing is the point. Xhuljo gave you the reasons, from the shared responsibility model to the cost of a month offline. Michal gave you the working system that answers each of them, plan by plan, and the yardstick to judge any alternative. The case and the capability both exist now. The only piece left is the one nobody can supply for you. Have you decided to act before the incident, or are you still planning to decide after it?
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About Life in Codes
Life in Codes is on a mission: to support organizations of all kinds to work in a more productive way. That means smart tools, healthy practices, and training the people. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner active in Romania, Estonia, Belgium, UK and the UAE, with our team spread across Europe.
Our client roster includes start-ups, SMEs, large financial institutions like SWIFT, government organizations like the European Commission, and logistics providers such as DHL.Our expertise spans a wide range of solutions, including ITSM, Agile Project Management, Digitalization, Knowledge Management, next-level customer support, DevOps, cloud migration and Rovo AI agents.
We firmly believe that working smart is universal – regardless of industry, company size, or team composition. – our diverse client base is a testament to this philosophy. Whether you’re a tech-focused team or not, Atlassian tools, coupled with our expertise, can significantly enhance your productivity and collaboration.
At the end of the day, we believe in the power of teamwork and we aspire to help people reach their full potential. By partnering with Life in Codes, you’re not just adopting new tools – you’re embracing a more efficient, collaborative, and successful way of working. Schedule an appointment
