Benefits of Rewind
- The granularity of backup and recovery features
- Helps maintain SOC 2 and ISO compliance
- Ensure business continuity after migration to Atlassian Cloud
- No in-house engineering resources required
If you have a major disaster, you need a partner who’s going to get your data back as quickly as possible, especially if something unexpected comes up. Rewind really wants to be a partner in solving these problems.
What Lutron Does
In 1959, physicist Joel Spira set out to create the world’s first dimmer switch, a controversial idea at the time. The innocuous invention paved the way for 50 years of innovations. Today, Lutron sells over 15,000 products on every continent.
Their light control systems have been installed in the New York Times Building in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Bank of China headquarters in Beijing, and households worldwide.
Jeremy Neyhart, Engineering Manager for Lutron, says the company’s software applications and the data housed within them are vital for ensuring the business always meets its customers’ needs.
“Lutron is a physical goods manufacturer. We ship many tractor-trailers full of products out the door, every hour globally. We need to ensure we have solutions that allow us to do that”, says Jeremy.
Why Backup Jira and Confluence
Lutron relies on Jira and Confluence to run vital parts of its daily operations. The business also houses a significant portion of its intellectual property with Atlassian Cloud. Jeremy says losing just one space in Confluence or one project in Jira would be a substantial loss for the company: “If we had a major issue and it took days or weeks to get back up, that’s hugely problematic.”
When the Lutron team migrated to Atlassian Cloud, they received the benefits of data mobility but inherited the new risks that come with it. The days of massive server rooms housing hard disks with backup redundancies are gone, but the risk of data loss remains.
SaaS providers operate using the Shared Responsibility Model for hosting data, usually outlined in the terms and conditions of each. This means users and administrators of a software application are responsible for backing up user data. SaaS vendors will only claim responsibility for ensuring their applications are up and running. Jeremy says it’s a shift many businesses have not realized or prepared for.
With our self-hosted instances, we had infrastructure that was primarily backed up, restored, and controlled by our IT system. When we moved to Cloud for Atlassian, our Dev Ops organization took over responsibility for backup and recovery. And we didn’t have a data recovery plan for it.
Jeremy says that, like other SaaS vendors, Atlassian could only recover an older data snapshot. However, for Lutron’s business model, the team wanted a better solution in the event of data loss.
It is an inevitability, and we needed to maintain business continuity and assure ourselves that our data was available in all scenarios. We realized most SaaS vendors couldn’t answer the question, “What happens if this or that occurs?” They had a lot of promises, but we wanted to own our data. We wanted to own our future.
Maintaining Compliance with Backups
As Lutron was migrating to Atlassian Cloud. Jeremy says the company also flagged maintaining data compliance as an issue. The team had already invested in their ISO certifications and was building out plans to achieve SOC2 Compliance. Jeremey says having reliable backup and recovery software that could also meet compliance requirements was vital.
We have a requirement to maintain daily data backups for everything we do in engineering. That is just not feasible with SaaS. It made things quite clear that a third-party partner would be able to meet our specific requirements and needs.
Why Rewind
Before evaluating third-party options, the Lutron engineering team considered building their own in-house backup tool. Jeremy says it was quickly apparent this path would be a poor use of his team’s time and resources.
We make dimmers, shades and lighting controls. We do that better than anybody in the world. We’re not a sophisticated backup system company. We don’t have 25,000 customers using our home-brewed version of a backup, so we don’t know all the pitfalls. And I can’t hire 20 developers just to work on a backup solution. I can find a partner who does this and is an expert in it. The value is there because no matter what the cost is, they’ll do a better job than I will.
Lutron evaluated a few partners, but Rewind stood out as the company that could support its needs as a large global company. Jeremey says they had specific criteria for backup frequency, granularity of restores, and recovery time objectives based on the business impact of data loss. Rewind had the team, experience and flexibility to deliver on these expectations as a long-term partner.
We’re not a sophisticated backup system company and can’t hire 20 developers just to work on a backup solution. I want a partner who does this and is an expert in it.
