“Rewind saves a lot of bandwidth, a crucial resource for any team. We don’t have to spend time adjusting to Confluence or Jira’s changing API standards. Rewind takes care of that for us.”
Sumukh Keni, VP of Engineering
As one of the world’s oldest industries, banking often falls behind when it comes to technological advancements. However, digital tools are ushering in a new wave of financial trends, such as cloud adoption—even among large-legacy institutions.
Sumukh Keni, VP of Engineering for FYNDNA, says banks worldwide face challenges integrating new software into their older processes and infrastructure. The patchwork nature of these tools leads to struggles, mainly because of the growing volume of transactions that banks process daily.
“Whether it’s an ATM withdrawal, funds transfer, bill payment or something else per se, these transactions pass through different layers from networks into the bank and back to other networks, says Keni. “To meet service level agreements for response times, functionalities like observability and data analysis have been put on the back burner.”
FYNDNA has spent the last few years designing the banking platform of the future to help institutions across the world transform how they derive value from their daily transactions.
Safeguarding vital data in Confluence or Jira
The FYNDNA development team chose Confluence and Jira as core collaboration tools. As they expanded from 30 to over 200 users in both tools and did some business continuity planning, they determined that the volume of user-generated data within these tools had passed a critical threshold.
“We realized it was the backbone of our collaboration journey. Confluence is not just a tool but part of our intellectual property. It’s where our journey starts and ends,” says Omkar Prabhune, Senior Software Development Manager at FYNDNA.
Throughout his career, Omkar says he’s seen firsthand how data loss impacts teams, including accidental deletions, user data removal, issues caused by plugins, etc. Having meticulously built their intellectual property over the past few years and facing the rigours of the financial industry, the development team did not want to risk their operations coming to a standstill.
“We want our intellectual property to survive any unfortunate incident. Every asset we create is valuable for us and our customers. If something goes wrong, restoring a single page would take 15 days.”
Atlassian servers are not a backup
As part of their recovery strategy, the team was adamant that backups of Confluence and Jira should be hosted on a server separate from Atlassian. Established IT teams have typically maintained a redundancy of vital user data; the only difference is that historically, these redundancies were hosted on a local server. FYNDNA wanted to follow the same best practices but in a cloud environment.
“Based on our senior experience as a development team, you cannot risk having a single vendor who provides both the service and a backup. If there are issues with the service provider’s server, there could be issues. Before evaluating our options, we knew we wanted to store a backup off Atlassian’s servers.”
Omkar says maintaining a third-party backup was also required as part of 1SO 27001 compliance regulations.
Saying no to home-grown data recovery tools
“If something goes wrong, restoring a single page will take just 15 days; that is a huge effort.”
Omkar Prabhune, Senior Software Development Manager
As part of their evaluation, the FYNDNA development team considered possibly building their in-house backup and recovery solution. Many businesses in their position have chosen this path but don’t realize the downside before it’s too late. Internal solutions often eat up valuable developer time as they spend cycle after cycle building and maintaining the new internal solution. Moreover, backup and data restoration are not the expertise of most engineering teams, diverting them from their core responsibilities.
“We can’t task our platform engineering team with everything because we want to focus on our primary delivery. We know the pros and cons of going this route based on the team’s collective experience. So outsourcing this activity to a third party was in our plans from the beginning,” says Omkar.
Why they chose Rewind
Omkar says Rewind stood out for various reasons when looking for a vendor to support their backup and recovery needs. Rewind allows for granular restorations within Jira and Confluence, demonstrates high customer support, and is straightforward to implement.
“When evaluating, we didn’t want a tool that only restored everything and overwrote our existing data. The probability of someone deleting an entire space is low. It will be on the individual level. We want control over the granular objects present in the Atlassian stack,”
Omkar Prabhune, Senior Software Development Manager
Uday Chauhan, Lead Software Engineer for FYNDNA, says the value Rewind has brought to the engineering team has been significant: “Rewind saves a lot of bandwidth for the team. We don’t need to focus on the changing API standards of Jira or Confluence because Rewind takes care of that for us. Manpower is a crucial resource for any small team.”
