With the global cloud market expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, businesses of all sizes and types are migrating their apps, data, and workloads to the cloud. But for companies in the BFSI and telecom sectors, cloud adoption comes with several hurdles. With stricter regulations constantly underway, storing private and sensitive data in the cloud is met with extreme concern.

Learn how you can secure your cloud collaboration and workloads with Atlassian data residency in India.

The Cloud Security Challenges of BFSI and Telecom

BFSI and telecom organizations operate in an extremely regulated environment that demands high levels of security and compliance. While most enterprises in these sectors have moved some or all of their workloads to the cloud, there are several cloud security challenges they face:

·  Strict local regulations: Organizations in the BFSI and telecom industries in India are always under strict scrutiny by local regulatory bodies. For instance, RBI has extremely strict finance data guidelines that directs central banks to undertake the responsibility of disseminating information under certain data categories and make data available at regular intervals. Similarly, when it comes to cloud services, TRAI finds it important to make regulatory interventions as and when required to protect consumer interests.

Sensitive nature of data: Compliance is one of the most critical requirements given the sensitivity of the data banks and telcos deal with. From personal details to call records, transactional data to internet usage details, card information to physical addresses, there is immense skepticism around the security of data and in the cloud.  

• Emerging cyber threats: The criticality of the banking and telecom data makes the sectors extremely vulnerable to modern-day cybersecurity threats. From unencrypted information to insecure third parties, malware and ransomware to insider vulnerabilities, spoofing, and phishing to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – these sectors need strong defense mechanisms in the cloud to safeguard themselves from emerging threats.
• Rising customer privacy expectations: Customers in these industries now have high data privacy and security expectations. They want greater transparency in knowing where and how their data is stored and prefer local data centers to global clouds.

How Local Data Residency Helps

Local data residency is becoming increasingly popular for companies in regulated industries like banking and telecom. It offers organizations a higher level of control over where their data is stored. For instance, banks and telcos can choose which data they want to store globally and which they want to store within a defined geographic location – and better meet regional laws. 

With local residency, banks and telcos can more easily meet their company’s data management requirements while also complying with necessary local regulations. Companies can visit Atlassian’s data residency page to get a list of all the Atlassian products in their organization, along with the location of each product and the AWS region the location corresponds with. If the data residency option is available for a product, they can request to move its in-scope data.

Available for Enterprise, Standard, and Premium cloud plans, Atlassian data residency ensures that teams of any size can securely manage their data in the region of their choice. Currently, data residency is available for Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Work Management, and Jira Product Discovery.

Exploring Atlassian Data Residency in India

Atlassian’s cloud hosting infrastructure is designed for optimal performance and reliability around the globe. It allows organizations to decide where they want to store their product data for Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence.

Recently, Atlassian announced the setting up of data centers in Mumbai, India. The company is poised to capitalize on India’s growing economy and talent landscape to drive growth and better meet the data residency requirements of organizations operating under strict regulations.

Robust Foundation Built on AWS: The data centers in India will be implemented in association with industry leader AWS. This robust foundation will pave the way for higher levels of dependability and optimal performance, with redundancy and failover options in the geographical region, so data cannot be moved out of the country.

While Atlassian will utilize Amazon’s data centers and hardware, it will set up all the systems and processes needed to ensure data stays in the right location.

• Localized and Encrypted Data: Banks and telcos utilizing Jira and Confluence can have their data located in India, closest to where the majority of users are located upon sign-up. Based on the origin of access, Atlassian’s cloud hosting infrastructure for Jira, Jira Service Management optimizes data, ensuring more reliable performance and reduced latency. Also, data stored on Atlassian infrastructure is automatically encrypted in transit, distributed for availability and reliability, and strictly controlled by data center vendors.
• Isolated Failures Due to Availability Zones: Utilizing AWS’s highly available data center facilities with multiple isolated and physically separated groups of data centers or Availability Zones (AZs), Atlassian’s data residency in India will allow banks and telcos to boost redundancy and withstand failure while responding increased customer and data load.
• Comprehensive Backups: For organizations utilizing data residency in India, Atlassian operates a comprehensive backup program where all internal systems have backup measures designed in line with system recovery requirements. For instance, Atlassian uses the snapshot feature of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) to create automated daily backups of each RDS instance that can be retained for 30 days – based on the organization’s requirements. This backup data is replicated to multiple data centers within a particular AWS region.
• Layered Privacy: With local data residency, Atlassian takes a layered approach to data protection, ensuring data is secure, private, compliant, and available 24/7. Utilizing transparent policies and multiple layers of protection, banks and telcos can manage how and where data is stored and accessed. 

As companies look to better meet compliance requirements, data residency is becoming a much sought-after requirement. Especially for BFSI and telecom companies in India, Atlassian is all set to offer local data residency. This will allow Indian companies and those operating within the Indian region to secure cloud collaboration and keep up with the slew of emerging regulations.