Backroads Protects Atlassian Jira Software with Revyz

Revyz is on a mission to help businesses protect their SaaS application data and is backed by Atlassian Ventures and Druva.

Backroads, the world's #1 active travel company, has been taking people on unforgettable biking, walking, hiking and multi-adventure trips around the world since 1979. The thoughtful, meticulous trip design has set Backroads apart from others in the business. Their trip leaders are consistently described by their guests as the best guides they’ve ever had. The company is based out of Northern California and operates in over 50 countries. Its 1,200+ full time and seasonal employees serve over 50,000 guests every year including many of them returning for new adventures.

Backroads has a very distributed workforce operating out of multiple locations throughout the world. Its IT team has broad responsibilities, from customer support to telecommunications, data storage, and application support.

Though the company uses a hybrid IT infrastructure, it sought to accelerate cloud projects. A year ago, it began its cloud journey with Atlassian by moving all its Atlassian applications to the cloud, including Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. Jira is a business-critical application for Backroads. The planning and execution teams at Backroads use Jira for creating and tracking detailed tasks for each team member, and also use Jira to capture critical guest preferences and related information as part of the planning and execution of the trip.

The data stored in the Jira application is absolutely critical for the success of Backroads. Within the Jira application when any data is deleted, be it Jira issues, attachments, comments, and/or configuration, those data objects are irrecoverably lost instantaneously. Any such data loss, accidental or otherwise, poses a significant risk to Backroads' business.

Atlassian operates a shared responsibility model for its suite of applications, including Jira. This means Atlassian is responsible for protecting the platform, while its customers are responsible for protecting the data within the application. Without secure backups in place, Backroads risked data loss due to accidental deletion, platform disruption, and security considerations such as insider threats and a variety of sophisticated external threats such as account takeovers.

For the IT team, the top priority for data protection was cloud-native capability, which had minimal operational overhead. The Backroads team started a proof of concept (POC) with Revyz. The same week they started a POC, a new administrator accidentally deleted a number of Jira issues, which included critical customer related attachments and information. Having the Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira Software literally saved the day for Backroads. “With Revyz we were able to instantaneously recover Jira issues and attachments deleted accidentally. The Revyz solution had our backs!” said Oscar Hernandez, Sr Systems Administrator. 

Another benefit is Revyz’s security posture and the enterprise class capabilities it offered such as audit logs, backup and restore job details. “Revyz is superior to anything else out there for Jira Data Protection” said Steven Huang, Backroads Head of IT. “Revyz provides us with peace of mind against accidental data loss.” 

Another differentiator is that Revyz is the first Jira native data protection application in the Atlassian Marketplace, making it very intuitive and seamless to operate. This was key for Steven and the team because it minimized the learning curve and the time spent in learning the application. 

Revyz is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), thus providing for secure offsite backup, with all the necessary controls needed to further secure the data including encrypting the data at rest with tenant and object specific encryption keys. Furthermore, with Revyz, backups cut ties with original data, protecting against corruption if a security breach occurs. 

While Revyz’s features are important, Steven was equally impressed with its support. “When we reached out to Revyz, we received amazing expert advice,” Steven said. “They quickly fixed any issues, and always well within our service level agreement (SLA).”

Revyz provides Backroads with a flexible, secure wayto backup and restore all of its business-critical Atlassian Jira data. In fact, Backroads IT team can now recover lost or deleted data almost instantaneously, it removes the tedious process of manual backups and restores – taking minutes instead of days. The solution also simplifies the location and recovery of Jira data in a granular manner. Granular data recovery is crucial as in most instances it is specific objects that get deleted not everything in one go.

The ever-present threat of an internal or external malicious attack used to be of serious concern to Steven’s team. Now, Revyz provides his team peace of mind. With Revyz, he knows exactly how the company will recover affected Atlassian Jira data when, not if, an attack happens.

Choosing Revyz means the IT team has more time to support staff as they help plan those memorable trips for their guests. “There are a lot of systems we could do without,” Steven said. “But not Jira. It’s the heart of our business, and Revyz ensures that data is secure so our company can continue serving our guests.”