Data residency gives organizations more control over their data by helping to ensure that any in-scope data (ideally this would include personal or sensitive customer data) is stored within the region they trust. Many organizations care about data residency and see it as a requirement to do business with a SaaS vendor. Data residency can also make it easier for companies to meet regulatory obligations related to data localization and transport.
If customers work in a regulated industry like finance, government, or healthcare, data residency may be a necessity for operating in a cloud environment.
Partners with at least one Paid via Atlassian app can learn more about data residency and other trust-related topics in the Encyclopedia of Trust in the Partner Portal.
To help Marketplace Partners offer data residency for Marketplace apps, we've made a number of changes to the Connect platform over the past two years to support realm pinning and more recently realm migration.
This month, we're excited to share a number of additional recent and upcoming changes to help Marketplace Partners offer data residency, and to help customers manage data residency for apps.
Partners can now support data residency in Canada for apps built on Connect
This month, we added a new realm for Connect data residency: Canada!
If you have a Connect app that stores data outside of Atlassian and you have customers who do business in Canada, we encourage you to think about adding support for data residency in Canada. To support this new realm, you must set up hosting in the region and then add the CA realm to your regionBaseURLs.
With Canada now available, we're shifting our focus to 6 other new regions for the whole Jira family of products, plus Confluence, and apps. All in all, we hope to have the following new realms to the list of supported realms for Connect apps in the coming quarters:
- Japan
- South Korea
- Brazil
- India
- the UK
- Switzerland
This is just the latest in a series of regions for which we've enabled data residency support, and it won't be the last. Check out Atlassian's public roadmap for more information on which regions we plan to support.
You can find instructions on realm pinning and regional support here.
Realm migration for Connect became generally available this month
Back in May, we announced the Preview release for Connect realm migration, meaning partners were encouraged to support realm migration on production. We were pleased to see partners exploring the solution and successfully releasing realm migration to customers after this milestone. Platinum Marketplace Partner K15t was even kind enough to share their experience implementing realm pinning and realm migration to help other partners learn about the process!
After observing numerous successful realm migrations from apps on customer instances, last week we changed the status of the Connect realm migration service and APIs to Generally Available (GA).
We encourage partners to explore realm migration for Connect apps by checking the documentation here.
Data residency for Forge hosted storage is coming in the new year
Supporting data residency can go a long way in showing customers that you take data protection seriously in cloud. But, it can take money and effort to implement and maintain data residency on your own.
That's why we're investing in data residency across all Atlassian-supported regions for any app data stored in Forge hosted storage. This week, we published an RFC on this topic which outlines the following approach (outlined below) in more detail.
Data residency for Forge hosted storage will allow partners to offer data residency for all data their apps store using Forge hosted storage without making additional investments in implementing or maintaining realm pinning or migration. Atlassian will take care of these things so you don't have to.
All you have to do is store any data that is in-scope for your app's data residency solution — this would ideally include any sensitive, personal, or otherwise private End-User Data — in Forge-hosted storage. You'll also need to document the data types you store in Forge hosted storage as "in-scope data" to help customers understand the scope of your solution. Forge data residency will include all the same regions as Atlassian product data residency, and will apply exclusively to data-at-rest, similar to Atlassian product data residency.
We plan to enable Forge data residency in Beta for customers with self service data residency beginning in the first half of 2024, which you can follow on our public cloud roadmap here. Before we roll out the solution more broadly though, we will begin testing with a few select customers. If you are eligible to participate in the EAP as a Marketplace Partner, we will reach out to you directly.
Other app data residency news
Realm persistence
To further support partners with Connect apps in implementing realm pinning and migration, we're also exploring realm persistence, which would allow an app's installation to stay in a previous realm for some period of time post uninstallation. This would proactively prevent incidents where an app is installed in a new region separate from it's historical data.
Customer UI General Availability
In addition to these exciting updates for Marketplace Partners, we're also working toward General Availability (GA) for the customer-facing app data residency solution we rolled out earlier this year.
We are in the process of finalizing some improvements to help keep customers updated on app migration status, and to increase clarity for customers when it comes to apps’ data residency status. This will help customers better assess which of their apps need to be moved, which apps cannot move, and which do not need to independently support data residency.
Customers can also find a link to your app's Privacy & Security tab in their app data residency UI, so be sure to keep this tab updated with the latest information about your app.
Investing in you
We know data residency can be a confusing topic and a major undertaking for some companies. To help you better understand the basics and plan your roadmap, we've released a number of resources and trainings, which can all be found in the Partner Portal under Grow Customer Trust.
Our top priority is ensuring you have the information and tools you need to succeed in cloud, so please don't hesitate to ask questions or request new resources directly in the Partner Portal. We're happy to help with whatever information we can provide.
Thank you for your continued partnership and investments in a trustworthy cloud experience for Atlassian customers.