Forge App development questions

[Mike]

Hello,

I have started to explore building apps for Jira Cloud using Forge platform, in this regard i have few questions.

1. My App has to fetch data from another application using a REST API(not jira rest api), in this context, is it even possible to call a REST API from Forge App hosted on Atlassian Cloud environment? 

If yes, do we have a guideline to do so?

If no, please suggest how to manage showing external application data on Cloud Jira?

2. And in regard to store data for Forge App, if incase i am not interested in storing data Atlassian environment in entity properties and storage, what other alternatives do i have? 

Thanks in advance