SaaS improvisation: High stakes, low readiness
When a critical SaaS platform becomes unavailable, IT and engineering teams feel the pressure immediately. Most organizations now operate with aggressive recovery expectations; in fact, 69% of leaders require tools like Jira to be back online within one to four hours. However, our research shows a significant gap in readiness. Of the enterprises we surveyed, half of those with these types of mandates either have no formal recovery solution or rely entirely on manual effort.
In reality, most teams do not fail because they lack backups; they fail because they do not have a predefined way to keep operating while an incident is being resolved. Relying on vendor support tickets or manual data reconstruction during an outage is a form of improvisation that rarely aligns with the recovery timelines the business demands.
What are the boundaries of “failover-ready”?
Being failover-ready is a specific state of preparation, not a technical promise of automatic or hands-off failover. It means ensuring that an organization is not forced to scramble when a platform fails.
While traditional recovery is reactive and assumes a period of total downtime, a failover-ready approach focuses on providing predefined options to maintain business momentum. It is about keeping humans in control and providing them with the tools to stay productive, even when the primary system is compromised. This distinction is critical for large organizations that cannot afford the estimated $9,000 per minute cost of downstream disruption.
The Roadmap: Hot Standby
A central component of the failover-ready future we are building is Hot Standby, which is scheduled for release in Q2 2026 for Jira.
Hot Standby maintains an independent copy of your SaaS environment data and structure, in a separate instance and located in a different region. If a primary system fails or becomes corrupted due to a localized outage, teams can use this standby environment to maintain context and continue their work. This feature enables work to continue, so that teams are not completely blocked while a primary incident is being resolved.
The Roadmap: Pilot Light
Following the release of Hot Standby, we are developing Pilot Light, which is planned for H2 2026 for Jira.
Pilot Light is designed to provide controlled, read-only access to critical data and workflows, even when the primary SaaS application is experiencing a platform-wide, non-localized disruption. This provides a necessary measure of continuity during outages that would otherwise result in a total loss of visibility.
Together, Hot Standby and Pilot Light set the standard for how organizations can meet aggressive recovery expectations in a realistic and operational way.
Resilience as a strategic priority
This evolution toward a failover-ready SaaS resilience platform is a direct response to the documented operational reality of the resilience gap.
In our Q4 2025 survey of IT and engineering leaders, 73% of organizations reported that outages in tools like Jira directly impact their delivery timelines, yet preparedness remains low.
Resilience is not just about saving your data; it is about saving your momentum. By building these capabilities on top of a best-in-class backup and recovery foundation, we are ensuring that businesses can stay operational through incidents, rather than just cleaning up after them.
Navid Khazra">
