Rewind expands SaaS data backup and recovery to Jira

Rewind, a data backup and recovery service for software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, now officially supports Jira, Atlassian’s issue tracking and project management tool for software development teams.

While most SaaS platforms provide some form of disaster recovery and security tools at an infrastructure level in the event of a major catastrophe, the customer themselves are ultimately responsible for their data at an individual account level, including permissions, password management, and — importantly — backing up data. This is what is known in industry-speak as a “shared responsibility” model.

Founded in 2015, Rewind helps companies such as Pampers and MVMT restore any file or piece of data to a specific date and time, though only in SaaS apps that Rewind officially supports. So far, this has included Shopify, BigCommerce, Intuit QuickBooks, GitHub, Trello, and Microsoft 365 — as of today, Jira is now part of the picture too.

SaaS surge

The SaaS business model is positively thriving — cloud end-user spending last year was pegged as a $332 billion industry, according to Gartner, with SaaS constituting the biggest portion at $123 billion. This figure is estimated to exceed $700 billion by 2030.

Put simply, SaaS is big and it’s only going to get bigger.

“In the coming years, the most successful modern companies will either be SaaS or rely on SaaS, which means they will become increasingly dependent on remote software to run daily operations,” Rewind cofounder and CEO Mike Potter said in a statement. “Businesses will need to quickly recover when disasters strike.”

Today’s launch, which was timed to align with World Backup Day, is notable for several reasons. Firstly, Atlassian invested in Rewind as part of its recent series B round. Additionally, Atlassian is scheduled to end support for on-premises server installations in 2024 as part of its grand plan to transition customers to its cloud. As with other major cloud service providers, Atlassian does offer some data backup and recovery support for system-wide catastrophes, but it doesn’t afford the same level of granular controls as something like Rewind, which puts the customer in direct control of their own data safeguarding efforts.

Indeed, Atlassian itself recommends that each individual customer make “regular backups.” Typically, this would involve a heavily manual process, and one that doesn’t really address how a customer goes about restoring their data from the backup. Rewind is all about making it as easy as possible not only to create daily backups, but restore it in minutes.

“Unfortunately, many businesses still operate under the flawed assumption that if they choose a reputable SaaS platform, their data is safe — and easily recovered,” Potter told VentureBeat. “While that is true for mass platform security and / or outages, that is simply not the case for individual, account-level data. As that is the data that their teams rely on daily and actually helps keep their businesses running smoothly, companies that fail to invest in comprehensive, third-party backups for their critical apps are putting their business data at risk every single day.”

Rewind’s Jira support includes data from projects, issues, boards, epics, sprints, and more, with pricing starting at $4 per user. Other SaaS apps on Rewind’s roadmap include Google Workspaces, Asana, GitLab, Hubspot, and Confluence.