Global engineering firm builds solid footing with Rewind

Benefits of Rewind

  • Easy to install and use
  • SOC 2 compliant
  • Able to house data in the UK 
  • Wide range of data protected in Jira and Confluence

“The data in our Jira has become instrumental in ensuring ongoing projects are maintained and pushed forward. If we lost it, we wouldn’t know who was working on what projects and what solutions were being implemented. It would cause major disruptions to our business.”

– Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator

Costain has been helping shape the world around us for over 150 years. Founded in 1865, the firm started working in general construction but quickly expanded into large-scale commercial projects during the 20th-century industrial boom. 

Historically, Costain has worked globally on significant projects such as railways, chemical refineries, airports, schools, and some of the world’s largest ports. In the past, Costain has helped build Dubai’s International Airport, the Cross Harbor Tunnel and the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong, the Thames Barrier in London, and helped construct the Mulberry floating concrete port during World War 2. 

Today, Costain’s activities are centralized in the United Kingdom, working to deliver vital infrastructure projects across the country “For example, currently, we are working on a number of Highways improvement projects, Water Treatment improvement projects, the continued construction of HS2, and we’re involved in projects to help improve Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport.” says Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator for Costain. Today, the firm is a leader in sustainable construction, employing over 3500 people across the UK.

To manage all the complex details of a number of these large-scale projects, Costain relies on Jira and Confluence. Michael says Jira Service Management runs the majority of their customer-facing operations. This can be tracking service contracts that support the various infrastructure projects, managing in-house software development, returns and warranty tracking and various levels of project management.

Sometimes a colleague will devise a new way to potentially use Jira, and I will help find solutions so the software can handle the request,” says Michael.

Managing Jira becomes a full-time role 

Working on an internal IT team of 300 people, Michael says only half of his work week was originally dedicated to Jira. As the use of the software expanded, overseeing Jira became a full-time role. Michael says a significant part of his time was overseeing a manual backup process. It involved creating a backup zip file of all the data being created in Jira. And he did this three times a week.

“The data in our Jira has become instrumental in ensuring ongoing projects are maintained and pushed forward. If we lost it, we wouldn’t know who was working on what projects and what solutions were being implemented. it would cause major disruptions to sections of our business.”

– Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator

Needing a new way to safeguard user data 

Michael says it was quickly apparent that the status quo was untenable. The manual process was taking up a large portion of his time that could be used more efficiently to support projects and users, and he was the only person in Costain who knew how the process worked. 

“I knew we needed a better process. The turning point was when the only other person who knew our manual process left the business, and I fell ill for a few weeks. I realized if something happened to me, Costain would have no access to the backups.”

– Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator

Backups are the user’s responsibility 

Most cloud platforms, like Jira and Confluence, strive to keep systems operational 24/7. You can log on and use the software, but can’t provide a backup if there’s a major failure or routine data loss. Jira and Confluence users are responsible for safeguarding and recovering their data, as there’s no guarantee that their data will be there the next time they log in.

Even if a cloud provider offers a snapshot of user data, it’s often old and incomplete.

You have no access to any backups Atlassian make, and they can only be used to restore the system on request or after a major system failure. Even if you did have access, using them would completely wipe all your current Jira data and roll back to whenever that disaster recovery backup was taken.” 

– Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator

Moving from manual to automated backups with Rewind 

Michael says they evaluated building an internal tool. Still, it was quickly ruled out, “We tried to use the API to extract the backups that could be created manually, but we found it cost-prohibitive because of the cost of storage.”

Michael says the Atlassian marketplace was their next stop for finding a backup and recovery solution. There were about eight different options, but Rewind instantly stood out. “Most of them were cheap, didn’t have strong reviews, and seemed sketchy.” Costain also needed vendors to meet SOC compliance needs, unlimited cost-effective storage, and provide UK data residency. Rewind was the only business that met all but one of these requirements for UK data residency; however, when contacted by Costain, the team at Rewind was willing to work with Costain and arranged to meet that final requirement, making them Costain’s top choice.

After trialling the backup and recovery platform, Micheal says Rewind exceeded their initial expectations.

“[Rewind] was capturing stuff we didn’t think it would capture, like the automation scripts we’ve written into our projects. That was a nice surprise because if I run the backups, I don’t have to rewrite those automation scripts as some are a bit complex.”

– Michael Wheatstone, Jira Organisation Administrator

Michael says removing the cumbersome manual backup process has freed up a significant amount of time each week, allowing him to work on other vital projects. “Rewind has given me probably 10 hours a week back, including after hours. I had to run the manual backups after everybody had finished working for the day.”

Michael says any business questioning the value of a third-party backup should realize it’s no longer a nice but a must-have for any forward-thinking IT team. “Rewind has changed how we look at backups, and it’s incredibly easy to use. “