Below is a blog post with an update from 2022 about Data Residency – but much has changed!

The summary:

• Roadmaps for Atlassian’s Data Residency in Canada originally scheduled the launch for late 2021.
• Shortly after, the launch was delayed until 2023, with no precise deadline to look forward to.
• Early 2023 saw a release of more information, including an update that Q4 in 2024 was the official availability date for Canadian Data Residency.
• Roadmap updates can be found here to follow the story!

January 13, 2022

Many of our Canadian clients have been asking about Canadian data residency for the Atlassian cloud products and we know how important that is to keeping your data secure when considering cloud products and SaaS. These concerns are especially true for those clients currently hosting their own on-premise Jira and Confluence; when you are used to keeping your data under your own control it can be difficult to transition to a cloud offering that will be storing your data in a foreign country.

Throughout 2021 Atlassian’s roadmap indicated Canadian data residency would be available late in 2021 or early 2022. We got bad news near the end of 2021 when Atlassian announced they would be delaying the launch date of data residency support for several countries, Canada among them, until 2023.

Atlassian had this to say on the rationale for the delay:

Atlassian is committed to becoming a leader in data residency, and in order to provide you with the best solution and to support the number of locations we aim to support, we need to invest some additional time improving our data residency infrastructure. These investments will allow us to launch new locations much more quickly in the future and give us the ability to respond faster to new or changing regulations across various countries

We’ve made the decision to focus on improving our data residency infrastructure, which will allow us to launch new locations much more quickly in the future and give us the ability to respond faster to new or changing regulations across various countries. This work will also help accelerate other priorities that bring greater value to you. 

As long time software developers, we understand when feature requests collide with architecture in such a way that you must go backwards in order to go forwards, re-tooling your architecture in order to support growth. This reminds us of the analogy that compares building software with building a house… and after the house is built you want to install a pool on the roof. You likely didn’t plan for that in the design for the house, so adding that fancy pool is going to mean shoring up the foundation and supporting walls. In terms of adding support for data residency in several countries, Atlassian is now upgrading the foundation before adding the pool on the roof.

We respect Atlassian for being transparent and sharing with us their reasons for delaying. And we appreciate the time they are taking to make sure they get it right – while we want Canadian data residency, we don’t want it at the expense of security, stability and reliability!

For some good news: Atlassian has expanded the option to select data residency to all customers with a paid plan – previously this was available only to the Premium and Enterprise tier. We applaud extending this to a wider range of customers given the importance of data residency to so many organizations.

Stay tuned and bookmark this blog post as Highway Three Solutions will keep this page updated with the latest information on when Atlassian will make available data residency support for Canada.

Are you unsure whether data residency is a requirement for you? Government rules are always changing and part of our expertise is to understand how those regulations affect your adoption of the Atlassian cloud products.