This is the first blog in a four-part series addressing the 2024 end-of-support for Atlassian server-based Jira and Confluence. Time is running out. Do you have a migration plan yet? Have you started and failed? Do you need the help of an Atlassian expert? This series will explore these questions and more as you assess your current plans for migration, your timeline, and the best practices to ensure your migration to Atlassian cloud or data center succeeds.
Choosing to move any software to the cloud, but more importantly, mission-critical applications like Jira and Confluence, should be a careful decision. It must involve planning and assessment across a number of factors:
If you haven’t guessed it already, the first step is an assessment. Of course, it’s not something you can sit at your desk one afternoon and do by yourself. Gathering the information to answer those questions above will take not only some time but also key stakeholders from throughout your company. You’ll need IT leaders, marketing leaders, business leaders, and anyone who will be affected by the migration.
Failing to get buy-in from the organization is one of the principal reasons that cloud migration projects fail. That’s because when migrations don’t take into account the needs of different groups, and how their business requirements translate into the cloud instance of the software, it can hinder an employee’s ability to accomplish their job when using that software. And rather than fail in their responsibilities, most employees will often turn back to the original software (or another workaround) to make sure they can accomplish what they need to.
When migrating software to the cloud, it’s important to note that even though a cloud-based instance of an application may be similar to a server-based version, there are differences. For example, in the case of Jira and Confluence, customizations or third-party plugins installed in the server-based version may not have been available in Atlassian Cloud.
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These differences require employees to learn new ways to do things. But, with mission-critical applications, there may not be time to do so and still operate the business. How do you solve this? Ensure your cross-functional team gathers requirements from everyone who uses the software. Then, when modifications need to be made to how the software operates (such as when configuring the cloud instance), those same people can be involved again to test and verify.
When the final switchover happens, employees who need to use the software for their day-to-day jobs will already be familiar with the way the new version works. No more workarounds.
In some cases, moving software or infrastructure to the cloud is a choice that your business can make. In other cases, like with Atlassian’s server-based version of Jira and Confluence, the migration may be needed because support will no longer be offered for the server-based version. But whatever is driving your move to the cloud, going in blindly will only hurt your chances for a successful migration. And any disruption in mission-critical applications that have moved to the cloud is bound to have an impact on your bottom line.
The function of an assessment, like ServiceRocket’s Fit4Cloud, is to determine issues or obstacles which might impede the success of that migration such as:
A good assessment, like Fit4Cloud, is intended to give you a sense of whether or not different aspects of your business are ready to be migrated. But nothing will prevent you from migrating even if an assessment identifies deficiencies or obstacles. It’s up to you to determine if the move should go forward anyway or wait for remediation before proceeding.
As the old saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” That is no more applicable than to an assessment of your cloud fitness. If you don’t know the questions to ask or what to look for, your assessment may very well miss critical components to a successful migration.
That’s where a partner can help. ServiceRocket consultants, for instance, have years of experience performing cloud-readiness assessments. That means they know what to look for, what questions to ask, and, more importantly, the best ways to remediate challenges to a successful migration. That means that every migration engagement with ServiceRocket has expertise built-in so you are never left wondering if you’ve selected the right partner to help you move from server to cloud.
Whatever you do, don’t take steps into the cloud based on mis-information (or a lack of information) about your readiness for a migration. Visit our Migration Hub to get started today.
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