Crow Insight builds its backup strategy with GitProtect.io backups for GitHub and Atlassian tools

Crow Insight assists public-interest organizations in illuminating their data, mainly via visual means. Having been solving information design challenges since 2013, the company has mastered its services and carved best practices for communication, user experience, and data visualization. The US Environmental Protection Agency, Sova Solutions, Verra, and the de Beaumont Foundation are among the organizations that Crow Insight has helped better understand and communicate data.

To ensure its data security, availability, and accessibility, the company adopted GitProtect.io backups for GitHub, Bitbucket, and Jira environments. So, let’s look at the story of Crow Insight, a company that initiatives an intuitive way of engaging audiences and empowering professionals to learn from data via visualization, and its way of securing critical data.

How creativity and innovation go hand in hand

Crow Insight, a US award-winning information design firm, builds its business on core principles - integrity, partnership, communication, and cost-effectiveness. Its team, which consists of data analysts, information architects, graphic designers, illustrators, and editors, is aimed at serving the public interest and assisting organizations to make a lasting impact on the world.

Having a small multidisciplinary team with remote offices around the USA, and headquarters in the heart of the United States - Washington D.C., Crow Insight uses Bitbucket, GitHub, and Jira to create custom web applications for public-interest clients, primarily related to environmental and public health issues.

Backup becomes a necessity

Highly valuing its work and service, the company decided to keep up with the cybersecurity insurance policy, and, thus, re-assessed its information backup plan. On that, the Crow Insight DevOps team realized that in case the company’s data is corrupted the only copies they have were the locally synchronized ones on their developer’s devices. Moreover, they didn’t have any backup of commit history, which is one of the key parts for developers to track the changes.

Even though Atlassian and GitHub offer resiliency guarantees, they follow the Shared Responsibility Model rules. According to it, the team is responsible for the security, backup, and recovery of all DevOps data at the account level and ensuring long-term data retention. Moreover, with a relatively small DevOps team, there was a greater need for automation. That's why Crow Insight started looking for a solution that fully automates data protection processes, and is easily managed (including roles and permissions management), with the ability to fully customize notifications and reports for easier testing, tracking, and managing. The solution that best met the usability and manageability criteria was GitProtect.io.

Crow Insight implements GitProtect.io

After in-depth research, Crow Insight’s team encountered GitProtect.io backups for GitHub and Atlassian tools. “It was simple and focused on specifically what we needed,” says Sarah Reed, Software Engineer at Crow Insight.

Automated backups for multiple tools

Crow Insight has a complex system for managing its data - it uses GitHub, Bitbucket, and Jira. Thus, the company needed a backup solution that could allow automated backups for its entire stack.

GitProtect.io supports both GitHub and Atlassian platforms, so now Crow Insight can schedule backups for its important data and manage backups from a single place. Moreover, the backup software allowed Crow Insight to back up its metadata which is of critical value for the company.

Our repos and metadata weren’t fully protected in the past. The biggest difference is that GitProtect.io. is automated and captures metadata.

Sarah Reed,Software Engineer at Crow Insight

Backup of only specific DevOps data

By adopting GitProtect.io, Crow Insight got the opportunity to select the data they wanted to protect. “We have the flexibility to choose which repos and metadata to back up and can grow and adjust those choices as our needs change,” - says Sarah.

The Crow Insight team now can create different backup plans protecting only the data which is of the most critical importance.

Easy & fast recovery

Now, in case of a failure, Crow Insight can quickly restore its data without interrupting its business continuity. Depending on the situation, the company’s DevOps team has an opportunity to recover its data quickly using granular restore or full recovery of its GitHub and Atlassian tools to the same or new account, local machine, or another Git hosting service - with easy cross-over recovery from GitHub to Bitbucket and vice versa.

With GitProtect, we can be sure that our repos and metadata are being automatically backed up and can be easily restored in case Bitbucket or Github goes down.

Sarah Reed,Software Engineer at Crow Insight

Intuitive UI/UX

GitProtect.io tends to make the user experience as simple and intuitive as possible. It was one of the backup software’s strengths that made Crow Insight’s team opt for the backup solution: “The UI also made it easy for our principal consultant, who isn’t a developer, to review and confirm our repo backup strategy,” mentions Sarah Reed.

Setting up backup plans, roles, and permissions, restoring the DevOps stack data, and monitoring backup performance - all of that from a single place. Moreover, GitProtect.io’s data-driven dashboards give an informative visual representation of backup performance, compliance, SLA, and real-time state of the tasks. All of that helps Crow Insight’s DevOps team to understand the current state of its data protection, organize its tasks, allocate resources, set up roles between the team members, create backup policies, and respond faster with restore and DR capabilities should the event of failure occur.

Conclusion

With the implementation of GitProtect.io backups for Bitbucket, GitHub, and Jira, Crow Insight managed to meet all the company's needs in protecting its DevOps stack. Now the company has guaranteed comprehensive data protection, security of DevOps data, and fast recovery if the need arises. And all of that from a secure intuitive single platform.

GitProtect gives us the peace of mind of knowing that our repos and metadata are being automatically backed up and can be easily restored once we set up the system.

Sarah Reed,Software Engineer at Crow Insight