Just like other collaboration tools, Miro has become critical for many companies when it comes to creating user journeys, roadmaps, and strategic projects. Losing invaluable brainstorming or product development data can lead to costly disruptions in product planning, engineering workflows, and stakeholder alignment.
As collaboration moves increasingly to the cloud, ensuring proper backup and recovery capabilities for these essential tools is no longer optional — it's a business continuity imperative.
The Rise of Cloud Collaboration Tools
Modern teams rely on visual collaboration platforms like Miro to facilitate remote work, brainstorming sessions, and strategic planning. These platforms have evolved from nice-to-have tools to mission-critical infrastructure that houses:
- Product roadmaps that guide development priorities and resource allocation
- User journey maps that inform product design and customer experience strategies
- Strategic planning boards that capture executive-level decision-making
- Design thinking workshops that drive innovation initiatives
- Project timelines that coordinate cross-functional team efforts
- Customer feedback synthesis that shapes product evolution
With approximately 90 million users globally and 130,000 companies' collaboration data stored on the platform, Miro represents a significant concentration of business-critical information that requires proper protection.
Understanding the Risks
Your teams work hard on projects — from their conception to the finish line. Collaboration inside teams has moved to online tools where everyone can contribute across the globe. As all this important work product has moved to the cloud, it's critical to remember to ensure it's all safely stored in case of human error, disruption, or cyberattack.
Common Data Loss Scenarios
Accidental deletion: Team members inadvertently delete boards containing months of collaborative work, with no way to recover the detailed content.
Malicious actions: Disgruntled employees or compromised accounts could deliberately destroy critical project data.
Ransomware attacks: Cybercriminals increasingly target SaaS platforms, potentially encrypting or destroying cloud-based collaboration data.
Service disruptions: Platform outages, whether due to technical issues or security incidents, can block access to critical business information.
Permission errors: Misconfigured permissions could result in data being overwritten or modified by unauthorized users.
Integration failures: Problems with connected applications could corrupt or delete Miro board data.
The Shared Responsibility Model
Many still don't know that SaaS applications work under a shared responsibility model. This means Miro is responsible for its infrastructure and availability, but customers are responsible for their data.
All companies using Miro assume the responsibility of ensuring that regular backups are in place and that they're controlling user access and permissions with sufficient authentication methods.
Understanding SaaS Provider Limitations
While SaaS providers work hard to maintain uptime and reliability, their backup capabilities typically focus on system recovery, not individual customer data restoration. Understanding these limitations is crucial for proper business continuity planning.
Limitations of Native Backup Capabilities
With their native backup capabilities, Miro allows backup and restoration of boards manually downloaded from the application — with significant restrictions:
Manual process requirements: Users must individually export boards, creating a time-consuming and error-prone backup process that's difficult to maintain at scale.
Limited restore capabilities: Larger backups cannot be directly restored through the user interface and require manual exporting and reconstruction.
Incomplete coverage: Miro only backs up boards — account settings, team data, project configurations, and user metadata are not included in their backups.
No automation: Without automated backup scheduling, organizations risk significant data loss between manual backup attempts.
Recovery complexity: Restoring from manual exports requires significant effort to reconstruct board relationships, permissions, and configurations.
Point-in-time limitations: Manual backups only capture data at specific moments, with no ability to restore to arbitrary points in time.
Only independent backup and recovery capabilities will ensure your team always has the ability to recover and restore in situations of data loss.
Comprehensive Backup Solutions for Miro
Modern backup solutions are now offering comprehensive and secure ways to back up all data and metadata in Miro. Organizations can benefit from:
Automated Protection
Scheduled backups: Automated backup processes ensure your data remains preserved and recoverable whenever you need it, without relying on manual processes.
Continuous monitoring: Regular verification that backups are completing successfully and data integrity is maintained.
Incremental backups: Efficient storage of only changed data while maintaining access to complete historical versions.
Advanced Recovery Capabilities
Instant search and preview: Quickly locate specific boards or content within your backup data without full restoration.
Granular recovery: Restore individual boards, specific versions, or entire workspaces as needed.
Point-in-time recovery: Roll back to any previous state to recover from accidental changes or malicious actions.
Data comparison: Identify records added, modified, or deleted over time, enabling precise recovery of exactly what's needed.
Enterprise-Grade Security
Vendor-independent storage: Backups stored separately from the primary SaaS platform reduce correlated risk and align with best-practice separation of duties.
Immutable backups: Write-once retention protects backup integrity from ransomware, insider threats, and accidental deletion.
Unlimited retention: Maintain backup history for compliance requirements and long-term data protection needs.
Encryption at rest and in transit: Ensure backup data remains secure throughout its lifecycle.
Operational Benefits
Easy implementation: Quick deployment with intuitive interfaces that don't require extensive training or technical expertise.
Compliance support: Easily prove compliance with backup requirements and data protection efforts for audits and regulatory reviews.
Predictable costs: Clear pricing models that scale with your organization's needs.
Comprehensive SaaS Backup Strategy
Recent additions to backup platform coverage have focused on crucial applications for Product and DevOps organizations — securing processes from brainstorming to development and execution.
Having your collaboration tools, project management platforms, and development tools backed up creates a comprehensive safety net. When Jira, Confluence, and Miro data are all protected, you'll never have to worry about the cost, compliance, or security of your project management ecosystem.
Building a Complete Protection Framework
Identify critical applications: Map which SaaS tools contain business-critical data requiring backup protection.
Establish RPO/RTO requirements: Define acceptable data loss and recovery time objectives for each application.
Implement automated backups: Deploy backup solutions that don't rely on manual processes or user intervention.
Test recovery regularly: Validate that backups can be successfully restored and meet defined objectives.
Document procedures: Maintain clear runbooks for backup and recovery processes.
Monitor continuously: Track backup success, data growth, and potential issues proactively.
Business Continuity and Risk Management
Ensuring business continuity means including backup and recovery planning into the mix from the start, not as an afterthought. For collaboration platforms like Miro, this means:
Risk assessment: Understanding what data lives in Miro and the business impact of losing it.
Backup strategy: Defining automated backup schedules that balance protection with efficiency.
Recovery planning: Establishing clear procedures for different recovery scenarios.
Testing cadence: Regular validation that backups work and recovery objectives can be met.
Stakeholder communication: Ensuring teams understand backup protection and how to request recovery when needed.
Best Practices for Miro Data Protection
To maximize protection of your Miro collaboration data:
Enable automated backups immediately: Don't wait for a data loss incident to implement protection.
Define backup schedules based on usage: More active teams may need more frequent backups.
Implement least-privilege access: Control who can modify or delete boards to reduce risk.
Use multi-factor authentication: Protect accounts from compromise that could lead to data loss.
Train teams on recovery: Ensure users know how to request recovery when needed.
Monitor for anomalies: Watch for unusual deletion or modification patterns that might indicate problems.
Maintain backup documentation: Keep clear records of what's backed up and how to recover.
Test recovery quarterly: Regular testing ensures procedures work when urgently needed.
The Cost of Data Loss
Consider the business impact of losing critical Miro boards:
- Lost productivity: Teams must recreate weeks or months of collaborative work
- Missed opportunities: Strategic planning and product roadmaps must be reconstructed from memory
- Delayed projects: Product development timelines slip while teams recover lost work
- Competitive disadvantage: Innovation initiatives lose momentum and market timing
- Team morale: Frustration and demotivation from losing significant creative effort
- Stakeholder trust: Questions about organizational competence in data management
The cost of implementing proper backup protection is minimal compared to the business impact of significant data loss.
Looking Forward
As collaboration continues to move to cloud platforms, organizations must adapt their data protection strategies accordingly. The same rigor applied to traditional business systems must extend to modern collaboration tools.
Miro and similar platforms are no longer supplementary tools — they're core business infrastructure that requires enterprise-grade protection. By implementing comprehensive backup and recovery capabilities, organizations ensure that their collaborative work remains protected, recoverable, and available when needed.
Don't wait for a data loss incident to discover the limitations of native backup capabilities. Implement independent, automated backup protection now to ensure your team's valuable collaboration work is always secure and recoverable.
This article was inspired by insights from Keepit Blog on protecting SaaS collaboration platforms like Miro.