Why might a clone be needed?

When working on support requests or as part of development, the Cloud Support team may request that a clone be taken of your instance. This allows us to use improved debugging techniques with your Application without affecting your production instance.

What does this entail?

A clone is as the name implies, it's an exact copy of your entire instance. When performing a clone:

1. We will never create a clone without direct permission from you.
2. The clone is destroyed after the issue reported in the support request is resolved.
3. If the clone is not related to a support case, the clone will be destroyed in 4 weeks, unless otherwise agreed.
4. All clones remain in our production infrastructure and are subject to the same compliance as your existing instance.
5. The act of creating a clone does not have any performance impact on your instance.
6. We also deliberately break the clone's ability to send and receive emails and make external connections, so it won't be sending out or pulling in emails that would be otherwise processed by your production instance.

Who has access to a clone?

Clones cannot be accessed by anyone except Atlassian Support and our Operations teams, the same as your regular production instance. Individual developers who are assisting support on a given issue may also be granted access to the clone on a case-by-case basis.