⭐️ Update: Staged rollout of data residency for Forge hosted storage has started! The feature will gradually roll out to customers over the coming month. Please see change log for more details.
As we continue shifting customers from Data Center to cloud, meeting customer trust expectations remains a top priority for Atlassian. One key area of investment is data residency, where we're focused on helping customers keep their data in a location that they trust. This is often important for meeting company requirements, or it can even help companies meet regulatory requirements.
We're constantly making new investments in our platform to continue expanding data residency to new locations and products. But of course, apps are also a key component of many customers’ Atlassian solution.
According to our customer surveys, 80% of surveyed enterprise customers with app trust concerns cite app data residency as "very or extremely important”. As a result, we're constantly working to make it easier for Marketplace Partners to meet customer data residency needs.
One investment that we're particularly excited to share with you is data residency for Forge hosted storage. From March 28th 2024 onward, Forge hosted storage will automatically include data residency.
What does this mean for you?
With data residency available for Forge hosted storage, you have an efficient new option to meet customer data residency needs with minimal additional investment. Forge will take care of the hosting, pinning, and migration of data stored in Forge hosted storage, so you can focus on building a high quality app for your customers.
Data residency for Forge hosted storage is the latest milestone on our shared mission to offer enterprise-ready apps to customers in cloud. With data residency available for Forge hosted storage, meeting a key customer trust requirement will be easier than ever.
You can read more details about data residency for Forge hosted storage here.
What does this mean for your customers?
Customers with apps that use exclusively Forge hosted storage for in-scope data will see relevant apps migrated and pinned automatically to the same location as the host product at the time of the beta release. From that point on, these apps will be automatically migrated and pinned whenever and wherever the host product data is moved. For new app installs, the app will automatically be pinned to the same location as the host product.
Customers will see these apps as "pinned" on admin.atlassian.com whenever their host product is pinned, and eligible to be pinned to any of Atlassian's supported locations if the product is still in the Global location. They will also be notified before scheduling their data migration about which apps will move along with the product.
What do partners need to do?
To prepare for this change, there are a few steps you'll need to take for all Forge apps, especially those that use Forge hosted storage:
- By March 28, 2024:
- If you have remotes or external permissions defined for your app you will need to provide more information for each remote in your manifest. This will ensure customers see that your apps will move and be pinned with the host product in admin.atlassian.com. For instructions, read here.
- Note: a change made to an existing remotes baseURL will continue to trigger a major version upgrade. This is expected behavior and will not change with this update.
- If you have no remotes or external permissions defined for your app, no manifest changes are required, but we recommend you redeploy to get the benefits of multi region compute (see step 2 below).
- If you have remotes or external permissions defined for your app you will need to provide more information for each remote in your manifest. This will ensure customers see that your apps will move and be pinned with the host product in admin.atlassian.com. For instructions, read here.
- By March 28, 2024: redeploy your app, regardless of whether you've made updates to your manifest — this will allow your app to benefit from multi-region compute and maintain performance when pinned. Failure to redeploy by March 28th could result in performance impacts for some customers.
- In April, 2024: update your app's Privacy & Security tab to indicate its support for data residency, and to outline any "in scope data" for your app's data residency solution. "In scope data" will include any data stored in Forge hosted storage.
You can read more instructions on how to offer data residency for your app using Forge hosted storage here.
Learn more about data residency
You can read more about data residency (what it is, why customers care about it, how you can support it for apps built on Connect) in the Partner Portal. We have an Intro to Data Residency page, as well as a data residency training available to help you get up to speed.
Thank you for your continued investments in cloud trust and enterprise readiness. We'll continue looking for ways to make it easy for you to build enterprise-ready apps for customers in cloud.