Category: Atlassian

There has never been a better time to execute a migration to Atlassian Cloud. 

Recent announcements at Atlassian’s Team23 conference included new products (Jira Product Discovery, Beacon), new features (Atlassian Intelligence (AI), Slack/Teams integration, Digital agents), and impressive improvements (Data residency location choice, Portal customization, Workflow and toolchain templates), demonstrating the vast range of opportunities and useful features/products that Atlassian’s cloud platform offers to elevate your service solutions.

Atlassian’s tools continue to grow more effective, efficient, and powerful, leading to improvement in the methods and practices they support.  Dominant technologies like ChatGPT have proven how integrating new technologies into your business can help streamline activities and improve your day-to-day operations to keep your company competitive in the market space. Taking this into consideration, organisations should understand that adopting these tools at the outset is well worth the investment of time and resources to adapt & upgrade internal tooling, methodologies and policies.

Given that cloud migrations take 3-9 months on average, it is important to commence the move off your server instance into the cloud as soon as you can. In February 2024, Atlassian’s Server End Of Support (EOS) date will lapse and server customers won’t receive any future products, developments, or improvements to their site. Executing a migration now will ensure the business impact is kept minimal and change management has low complexity while guaranteeing you are able to continue utilising everything Atlassian has to offer. 

JDS recommends you carry out the migration before the gap between server and cloud becomes too vast. It will ensure your business receives upgrades and improvements that will keep it adapting to new market climates. Migrating now will also give you greater time to implement change management and adopt new and improved practices, ultimately adding value to your business operations. Migrating before the EOS date will also allow you to integrate the new system into your business while the look and feel of Atlassian Cloud products remain similar to their on-premises server offerings. This will mean that your staff and customers will easily adapt to the new environment without requiring extensive time and resource-consuming activities like upskilling and training.

Atlassian has shown that it has big plans around its product roadmap for the future. Adopting change now will minimise business impact while allowing you to keep your business at the forefront of advancement and technology.  It will also give you a headstart on establishing best practices and refining processes as Atlassian products continue to develop and evolve into the future.

End of Server Sales and Support

In late 2020, Atlassian announced their end-of-life roadmap for Server edition sales and support in a push towards migrating to Atlassian Cloud (see below). Three years on, we find ourselves hitting the third milestone of this plan, and no longer have the ability to purchase new apps for Atlassian Server. The final end-of-support date of February 2024 is now fast approaching.

It has never been more important for users of Atlassian Server to start planning their move to Atlassian Cloud as these migrations can prove to be more complex and involved than originally anticipated.

JDS, a Gold Atlassian Solution Partner, has assisted a multitude of customers with their move to Atlassian Cloud, including migrations with large-scale data, multiple instances, alternative approaches (where the traditional JCMA tool was not viable), and extended products beyond Jira and Confluence (Such as Bitbucket and Zephr).

Why Cloud?

Some users may have reservations about making the move to a new platform, especially those who have not experienced what cloud has to offer, however there are a number of benefits to be acknowledged. Moving to cloud means that Atlassian takes on the hosting and management responsibilities, resulting in a reduction in overhead costs relating to Atlassian products. Atlassian Cloud also offers a wide range of new and extended functionalities built into its out-of-the-box solutions (see table below), and there is an expansive and valuable marketplace of add-ons.

What to do next…

With this imminent end-of-support date, and the knowledge that migrating to cloud may take upwards of 6 months, it is no surprise that Atlassian and Atlassian partners are recommending cloud migrations for all Atlassian on-premises products be carried out as soon as possible, especially while Atlassian is offering reduced costings and extended cloud trials.

Atlassian supplies you with the JCMA tooling which can be implemented by your internal IT team, however there are often pitfalls and complications that can arise during migration that can be difficult to navigate without in-depth knowledge.

In addition to this, given the current climate of data security, it is extremely important that all necessary steps are taken to minimise the risk of data loss and exposure of cyber vulnerabilities. Therefore, it’s highly recommended that an Atlassian Solutions partner is engaged in the migration project to ensure a seamless implementation and successful outcome.

If you haven’t yet moved to Atlassian Cloud, JDS is here to assist as a local Atlassian Gold Solutions Partner with invaluable depth of expertise and experience.