With the recent announcement of Atlassian’s Journey to Cloud, many users of server products are searching for the path forward. While the response to the timing of Atlassian’s server products’ end of support has brought about, shall we say, a mixed response, it has created a new need: what is the best path forward over the next year or two? Following are some areas to consider.

Start for Free – Atlassian’s Free Cloud Products

First, let’s start with some basic information for small teams (those teams with less than 10 people). Atlassian offers versions of its Cloud products for free use. This includes the most popular apps like Jira, Trello, Confluence, and Bitbucket, as well as Jira Service Management, Opsgenie, Statuspage, and Jira Core. User and feature limits vary so I recommend that you review the information posted at https://www.atlassian.com/software/free to see if the free licenses meet your needs.

Many small teams will find the feature set of these free tiers to far exceed the capabilities of many paid or opensource products.

Preparing for Cloud Success

There are significant differences between cloud and on-premises versions of Atlassian. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered before moving forward with a cloud migration. And while many of the questions are of the yes/no variety, many more have significant gray areas that don’t necessarily provide a clear path forward. This is where having an experienced guide can save you time and pain both before and during your migration to cloud.

It’s important that the resources used to evaluate your current environment have an understanding of both on-prem Atlassian and the Cloud. This perspective will allow you to evaluate and provide a detailed inventory of your Atlassian tools, their integrations into your business or CI/CD pipeline or operations tools, and the use of third-party software. Each should be considered with a forward-looking perspective on the impact to the tools and integrations if you should move to the cloud. Critical areas of knowledge include:

  • Migration paths for both Atlassian core data as well as the available migration paths for marketplace add-ons
  • Security and Compliance
  • One-shot vs multi-step migrations
  • Data residency
  • Experience moving organizations of your size (whether a couple hundred or 10,000).

Many organizations will attempt to perform these tasks without an Atlassian Solutions Partner. While in the end we are sure they will reach their destination in the cloud, the impact of hurdles and pitfalls during that journey can cause great strain, both financial and personal, to your teams and organizations. For large organizations of 1,000 users or greater, Atlassian advises customers to partner with a Certified Solutions Partner to help with their planning and migration in order to maximize the value of moving to the cloud.

Forty8Fifty Labs has guided many customers, large and small, on migrations from Server to both Data Center and Cloud. We hope you’ll consider Atlassian’s recommendation and choose us as your partner to help answer your questions on on-prem vs. Cloud, provide counsel and insight on your requirements and plans, and assist you on your cloud journey. Reach out today to start your cloud migration journey on the right path.