This is the final 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 a partner? 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.
You might think everything is finished now that your software is off your servers and in the cloud, but that is not the case. Your business is changing. Your market is changing. Your customers are demanding more, asking for it differently, or requesting something new.
Because of that, you can’t sit on your new cloud-based version. Your mission-critical Atlassian software, like Jira and Confluence, are now integrated deeply into your business processes. And ensuring your business is making the most of it can give you the competitive edge you need.
Your mission-critical software is integral to your business which is why you spend so much time looking for ways to improve how you use it. Not just adopting new features, but defining new integrations and building new processes. That’s innovation.
Imagine finding a way to employ a mission-critical application like Jira or Confluence in a way that replaces a redundant application. Or imagine identifying a means by which to utilize the software differently that reduces the amount of time it takes to remediate a customer complaint? Innovation requires that you continually assess your use of the software against what features are available and how your business uses it.
As you innovate on ways to better use your software, you can also look for more opportunities to harness the power of the cloud. For instance, integrations which weren’t available in the server-based version of the software because of security concerns may be natively available in the cloud.
But innovation is useless if it happens in a vacuum. So what if you implement a great new way to use the software if no one is aware of it or understands how to use it. That’s why communication is so important to the long-term success of your migration. Now that you have your mission-critical application in the cloud, you have a world of opportunities for transforming your business. But you can’t do so without keeping your employees knowledgeable about new features or improvements you’ve made to the instance. Embracing a continuous communication program ensures employees are aware of upcoming features and improvements. This can take the shape of newsletters, hubs or portals, and even just plain emails.
Without an effective communications plan in place, tool adoption may falter resulting in increased timelines to your cloud migration project. Avoid this and other common pitfalls with our newest e-book.
Alongside continuous communication needs to be continuous training. Just telling your employees about new features isn’t enough. You need to provide resources so they can learn how to use those new features or innovation and how it applies to their jobs.
This means you’ll need to build in capabilities within your business to develop training programs and ensure employees complete them as necessary. Just like that commitment to communication, effective training programs depend upon expertise. You’ll need to leverage that cross-functional team to lend their knowledge of the new cloud-based system that other resources can turn into effective training materials.
Over the past three blog posts, we’ve explained various steps you’ll go through to migrate your mission-critical software to the cloud. Well, the processes we’ve described aren’t just about cloud migration. They can be applied to your continuous innovation as well.
Although you don’t need to assess your readiness, you do need to constantly document your current state against your ideal “future state.” Because technologies will change. The cloud will even change. And to leverage the benefits of the latest technology, you’ll need to embrace a continuous state of change.
Thankfully, the process you learned to migrate your software from server to cloud can also be applied going forward. You’ll want to not only look at where you can improve functionality and processes, but you’ll want to continually score the opportunities for transformation against a standard set of criteria (like expertise, cost, time, etc.).
Just like assessing your cloud readiness, building the plan, and executing the migration, you need expertise for communication and training. Some of that expertise will come from your journey through this process of migration and transformation. You’ll now have resources internally to help you craft messaging and develop training materials.
But there’s no doubt that you won’t stop with just a single migration. The move of Atlassian Jira and Confluence from your server to the cloud will only just be one of many. And it’s probably safe to say that you won’t have dedicated experts for each cloud-based application you deploy.
That’s where ServiceRocket comes in. We are your reliable partner in the acceleration of your business growth through the cloud. As you focus on other software to move from server to cloud, or migrate from one provider to another, ServiceRocket can help ensure the continued success of your existing migrations.
Planning a move to Atlassian cloud? Our newest e-book can help you avoid the most common pitfalls using ten best practices.
