Matics provides Real-time Operational Intelligence (RtOI) solutions for global manufacturing enterprises seeking to improve their production efficiency. The company collects and analyzes real-time machine data to provide clients with decision-ready insights and notifications of the state of their shop floor. Matics uses web, tablet and persona-based mobile application interfaces to deliver continually analyzed insights to relevant stakeholders within the production floor. The comprehensive Matics solution is rapidly deployed in a secure, cloud-based, non-disruptive, modular, and scalable way.
Matics’ team of 50 employees supports around 150 clients across Europe, North & South America, China, Australia, and Israel. The technologists who develop, manage, and hone the company’s enterprise solutions spend much of their time on source code generation and other development endeavors – many of which are on GitHub. The company’s development and support teams also extensively use Jira.
Matics’ R&D Manager, Eran Polak, explained: “We generally rely on Jira for customer engagement, but also for assigning tickets and QA tasks related to development projects.”
Data: the keys to the kingdom
For Eran, ensuring the company had a fail-safe backup solution for its GitHub and Jira repositories was imperative. Two unwelcome scenarios could arise: Accidental data deletion or modification on the part of a user, or a GitHub or Jira service outage.
While cloud outages aren’t daily occurrences, they do happen from time to time:
- In April 2022, Atlassian experienced an extended outage that affected 400 customers using Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Opsgenie.
- In September 2022, according to multiple reports, GitHub server issues prevented millions of developers from accessing community or independent projects.
I was concerned that, if for some reason, GitHub or Jira were to go down for a couple of days, or we experienced an accidental error, we would lose a significant amount of critical information. That is why we decided to have a backup solution.
Eran Polak
R&D Manager at Matics
Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model
As a seasoned technologist, Eran was familiar with the SaaS Shared Responsibility Model. “We knew Atlassian provides limited data backup coverage, but that doesn’t extend to backup of account-level data in GitHub and Jira,” he expressed.
The Shared Responsibility Model outlines where a cloud provider’s duty of care ends, and yours begins. Here’s how it works:
If a SaaS provider’s data center is destroyed by an extreme weather event or experiences a catastrophic technical failure, the provider would hasten to recover the entire platform to the last backup. But here’s the catch: These backups can’t be used to recover a single account back to a previous point in time or recover a selection of an individual customer’s data, such as a project or issue.
We knew Atlassian provides limited data backup coverage, but that doesn’t extend to backup of account-level data in GitHub and Jira.
Eran Polak
R&D Manager at Matics
Making the case for backup investment
A DIY backup solution would have been one answer to a potential data loss/unavailability issue. However, that came with a downside – the amount of time, effort, and cost involved in building, setting up, and maintaining it.
Eran engaged with Matics’ CFO, and together, they concluded that investing in a cost-effective and reliable third-party backup solution was the responsible choice.
After evaluating potential backup providers, Rewind emerged as the natural choice. Eran explained: “While searching for a backup solution, we discovered Rewind; when we examined their features and full solution further, we concluded that Rewind was the right solution for our data backup needs.”
Other key factors for selecting Rewind included the potential cost of lost productivity and revenue from downtime, the volume of manual rework involved in getting systems backed up, and potential legal liabilities from outages or data loss.
Management was impressed by Rewind’s frequency of automated backups, the speed and ease of recovery, and the duration of data retention.
The simple choice
“Rewind just makes life simple. We don’t need to worry about storage capacity or checking retention reports,” explains Eran. “In addition, we could bundle our SaaS backup investment for multiple platforms with a single provider.”
All this assisted in securing approval for this relatively minor investment.
