Cross-platform Recovery: Key to Surviving the Next Outage

Outages recently disrupted 46% of organizations just in 2025, yet 47% of executives still rate their resilience as high, according to a SAS report. In other words, despite nearly half the industry facing service failures, almost half still believe they’ve solved the problem.

It seems surprising. The more so in times when a single outage or vendor lock-in can halt all operations on a given platform. And that’s where “cross-platform portability” become a vital factor: this specifically refers to the ability to swiftly take data backed up from one system, and recover it into another, to revive or streamline operations ASAP.

Read on to better understand data recovery across platforms and how it can be a game-changer in the ever-evolving landscape of threats.

Why it’s key to be able to move data between platforms

For IT decision-makers, it’s an expected value. The ability to restore data “cross-platform” provides data mobility, rather than tying it to a single system’s stability, pricing, or regional infrastructure. It also allows tech teams to transform recovery from a one-way street into a flexible process that adapts to outages and migrations. The same goes for regulatory changes.

This may seem like a somewhat non-standard approach, given that traditionally-understood backup focuses on securing your data with the ability to restore it exactly to where it originated from.

Of course, it’s nothing bad to restore data to its original location, and it works, until:

• a SaaS vendor suffers a prolonged outage in one region,
• compliance obligations require data to be hosted in a different jurisdiction,
• a development team wants to transition from GitHub to GitLab (or maintain both for redundancy).

So, let’s repeat the above.

If your backup only allows “same-to-same” recovery, you’re stuck waiting, exposed to potential downtime and compliance breaches.

Cross-platform recovery solves the problem by enabling recovery across ecosystems. For instance, restoring a GitHub repository to GitLab, or migrating a Jira Cloud project to Bitbucket.

That said, let’s take a look at how such cross-platform recovery works.

Technical foundations (basis)

The above raises the obvious question: How and why does cross-platform recovery work?

In short, it’s because backup is stored in a neutral format, independent of the vendor’s storage internals.

GitProtect applies several mechanisms to make data migrations possible:

Universal repository snapshots	Commits, branches, pull requests, and metadata are captured in full.
Granular recovery	Teams can restore single repos, branches, or entire accounts to a different provider.
API-aware orchestration	GitProtect adapts and restores to each platform’s API limits and throttling policies, ensuring consistency.
Hash verification	Every object is checked against its original checksum to avoid silent corruption.

For Jira, the same principle applies. A project with issues, attachments, and automation rules can be backed up, and later restored into a clean instance – or even into another region if regulations demand it.

Compliance and regulatory pressure

From the ISO 27001, SOC 2, and DORA frameworks perspective, recoverability and vendor-independent resilience are crucial. A backup that the company can’t restore outside the vendor’s platform will likely fail to meet audit requirements.

A notable example can be found in the EU’s data residency laws. If your SaaS hosts data in a given country, but regulators demand that you move this data elsewhere, then you need evidence for quick and complete data relocation. And that means cross-platform restoration becomes a technical control and audit artifact.

In financial services or healthcare, RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) become contractual requirements – not just KPIs. In turn, the capability to restore across various systems translates into a difference between compliance and penalties.

Restoring data across platforms goes beyond Disaster Recovery

As you can already see, the narrative about backup changes with cross-platform recovery. It’s not just about recovering from a major “disaster”, ransomware or critical hardware failure.

There is much more to gain from a well-thought-out backup strategy, given that it includes being able to move data between platforms:

Vendor lock-in reduction	Exit or switch at will.
Multi-cloud strategies support	Data can be affected across AWS, Azure, or private infrastructure.
Mergers and acquisitions simplification	Quick IT system consolidation if needed.
Future-proofing against outages	That includes legal disputes and sudden policy changes from a provider.

The above, however, necessitates the integration of a few crucial elements into daily operations to make the most out of the newly gained “data mobility.” Among them, you can point out the most critical, namely:

• encrypted backups (AES 256 as a standard),
• deduplication,
• storage independent of the original vendor,
• restores targeting GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps (preferably within a single solution, without additional tooling).

Furthermore, it will be crucial to prioritize key capabilities when considering data restored across platforms. Let’s mention the most important:

• scheduled, automated backups with point-in-time recovery,
• immutable storage (WORM) to prevent tampering,
• cross-region and cross-cloud replication,
• flexible recovery options including entire accounts, repos, or single items.

Such capabilities mean IT teams are not limited to mere “copies of data”. They have access to fully developed and actual recovery options regardless of the environment in use.

At this point, if various companies can utilize the mentioned capabilities, then why aren’t these a common standard across markets?

Barriers to cross-platform data portability

It’s surprising that despite cross-platform recovery and full DevOps backup making perfect sense on paper, some factors still prevent businesses from adopting proper tools to make it a common practice.

BARRIER	LOGIC BEHIND PROBLEMS	OUTCOMES
Illusion of SaaS reliability	Many teams still believe that cloud means safety. They assume GitHub or Jira “take care of proper backups.”	Non-existent disaster recovery options. High sensitivity to human errors, ransomware, or account misconfigurations.
Vendor lock-in comfort zone	An urge to stay within one ecosystem. Keeping things oversimplified: no API integrations, no authentication setups, avoiding changes in audits and contracts.	Vendor lock-in and high dependency on its tech, safety, and reputation level.
Budget optics	Backups don’t generate revenue philosophy. Prioritizing visible innovation (new pipelines, AI integration, etc.) over “invisible” protection layers.	The costs of downtime remain theoretical until disaster strikes. High costs, including losses in reputation and competitiveness.
Fragmented responsibility	Devs assume IT security handles backup. Security assumes the platform vendor handles it. Compliance assumes someone must have handled it, as the audit passed last year.	Lack of coordination between teams. Rare moment of organizational alignment with vital consequences.
Underestimated compliance exposure	Compliance teams tend to focus on paperwork instead of restoring logs. Someone will configure “something” for automating audit reports.	Lack of tested recovery procedures for DORA, ISO 27001, or SOC 2 frameworks. Companies can’t prove vendor independence or jurisdictional control over data.
The inertia of the “good enough” approach	Teams follow the false sense of control based on legacy scripts, ad-hoc exports, and occasional manual backups. Cross-platform recovery is considered an overkill.	Omitted token rotation or an API limit blocks any export job. Data safety depends highly on a single system.
Cognitive bias of optimism	Approach based on an assumption that if the platform hasn’t failed so far (or recently), then it’s safe. “Lack of backup is manageable” approach.	Non-existent backup policy and tooling. Vulnerable data and its consistency. Constantly growing risk of a disaster and its consequences.

Back up data from one platform, restore it to another

Although businesses are aware of the stakes, many organizations still treat data resilience as an afterthought or don’t prioritize it sufficiently. The thing that truly holds them back is not technology but false perception.

From the perspective of many companies, the recoverability of their own data is trusted mainly to the uptime of SaaS vendors. The reason may be fear of operational complexity more than vendor lock-in. It may also be based on measuring short-term savings over long-term survivability.

Fortunately, the ability to restore data across platforms disassembles all such weak points. It provides verifiable recovery while transforming dependency into a flexible strategy. Additionally, you can convert compliance pressure into proof of control.

Nonetheless, the adoption of cross-platform recovery starts with a change in organizational mindset and approach. Both need to move from assuming resilience to actively engineering it.

Until reaching that point, most companies are only as resilient as the last outage or disaster they somehow managed to survive. It’s truly strange, as they have access to the most tech-savvy and business-oriented tools.

Such a solution allows for restoring and migrations across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. A repository backed up from one can be validated, tested, and finally restored to another platform in minutes.

Data portability seems like a pressing topic? For further reading, visit:

📌 How a Cross-Platform Tool Supports Data Migration
📌 Jira Migration Pros & Cons and Security Measures
📌 Moving Sandbox to Production In Jira: Best Practices for Admins
📌 How GitProtect Supports Migrarions And Data Portability