Author: Daria Kulikova

Who doesn’t want to be treated as a safe, trustworthy, and reliable business? It’s hard to find anybody in the IT or cybersecurity area who would say that they don’t. That is the reason why everybody who works with data wants to obtain SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 compliance. 

SOC 2 Compliance: Whats and Whys

When a company is SOC 2 compliant, it guarantees that it maintains a high level of information security and meets all the necessary criteria the Audit demands, such as Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. 

Who said that there is no link between backup and compliance? Why should you have a compliant backup? What is more, why a Disaster Recovery is an inalienable part of a company’s compliance? What place here is given to Disaster Recovery? All those questions are better to consider when you deal with a company that works with any kind of data, especially critical ones. 

Every day, businesses face different challenges, and they should find the solution as fast as possible. In most cases, when we speak about DevOps or IT societies, backup is crucial. 

It’s hard to imagine the software development lifecycle (SDLC) without DevOps tools. They are like a gold mine for the developers, as DevOps tools bring automation, improve collaboration between different members of the team, and tweak monitoring and alert systems. 

In this blog post, let’s fathom out the importance of DevOps tools backup, especially when it comes to GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, and Jira, and the reasons one can use to work on the CTOs, CISOs, Security, and Team Leaders to start protecting the company’s critical apps valuable for DevOps.

It is human nature to start thinking about a problem after it has already occurred — we don’t like to learn from somebody’s mistakes, though it is a good idea. But what if we consider a situation when the GitHub online code repository stops working for a while? Well, such things happen sometimes, though GitHub is a highly reliable vendor with numerous compliance certificates and standards, like ISO/IEC 27001:2013, GDPR, FedRAM LI-SaaS ATO, SOC 1, and SOC 2, and it is a Trusted Cloud Provider with CSA.

Still, starting to use GitHub as a git repository service, it is great to know from the beginning what your responsibilities, as a user, are and what GitHub can guarantee. So, let’s figure out what both parties are responsible for and how it works because usually, customers don’t even think about this mentioned Shared Responsibility Model. 

There is no doubt that Jira is one of the most popular project management and issue-tracking tools for organizations. It provides a great number of benefits to teams, including improved collaboration between technical and non-technical teams, increased visibility, enhanced productivity, better project planning, flexible customization, scalability, comprehensive reposting, agile methodology support, and, of course, easy compatibility with other Atlassian cloud products — Bitbucket and Confluence. 

However, what would your team do if something went wrong with your Jira data? In this artice, we will have a deep dive into Jira security best practices. Yet, first, let’s have a quick tour of what security risks and threats your Jira data can face, and what security approaches Atlassian uses to protect your data against those threats. 

Isn’t it magic when all your DevOps team, including new members, can access the company’s repository fast and securely by simply logging in once? It isn’t a dream! You can easily arrange it using SAML single sign-on (SSO).  

What You Should Know About SAML

Before jumping into the technical details of SAML, let’s try to understand what SAML is in a simple language. For that reason, let's look at an example. 

If you work in IT, then you definitely know why using such tools as Jira is more than a must. Let’s look at the numbers that Atlassian gives us… over 65K companies worldwide rely on Jira Software. Unfortunately, though, have they caught themselves on the thought that it is safe enough? What will the CTO, IT manager, or software house owner do if the Atlassian outage takes place? Well, an outage isn’t the only risk that leads to data loss… But let’s come to this issue a little bit later, and now let’s heat up the importance of data protection by figuring out why Jira is so necessary for our development process.

How Do Teams Benefit From Jira?

Jira greatly simplifies task management and takes on project managers’ requirements, like workflow estimation, project analytics, and many more. 

Creating something new and unique is a difficult task. If you multiply it with the development process, every GitLab user understands that protecting the source code is one of the most demanding but challenging tasks. So, what is the best way to protect the DevOps team’s work? Find the balance and assurance that the development workflow won’t be interrupted or lost under no circumstances.

One may ask: “What can happen to GitLab? It is one of the most reliable source code management (SCM) tool providers” Yeap, it is. Though unfortunately, there are a lot of threats like outages, ransomware, and downtime - imagine that even the entire GitLab server or GitLab database can go down. Thus, you and your team should always be ready for any disaster scenario. How? The best way to do it is to build a strong backup strategy for your GitLab data. Moreover, it is a good idea to integrate a default backup strategy into your DevSecOps process and CI/CD pipeline.