It’s impossible to know everything about the Cloud migration process. As companies large and small weigh whether to move to the Cloud, they wisely turn to the experts. The result has led to many conversations with our Atlassian Cloud migration team.
Often quite detailed, these discussions have proved invaluable to our customers and informative for our team. They’ve enabled us to uncover some important details about the migration process that are sometimes overlooked. Keep them in mind as you contemplate the advantages of migrating to the Cloud.
One of the benefits of moving to Atlassian Cloud is that it simplifies the customization of Jira Software and brings product teams back to a shared standard.
No doubt, a shared standard can provide greater efficiency and the capacity to be more agile, as long as it meets the company's needs. That doesn’t imply that we can only use a vanilla out-of-the-box workflow. The real benefits are delivered by shared and improved standards with clear implementation guidelines for the Cloud platform.
Standardization means workflows where everyone agrees what “Done” means when an issue is moved to that status, regardless of which team or project owns the issue. Standardized workflows also dramatically improve reporting accuracy.
This benefit was clearly illustrated by one of our enterprise customers. Inspired by the benefits of the Cloud platform, they decided to clean up their existing workflows and design a few standard workflows for use across different teams, even before deciding on a migration strategy. In the end, they decided Data Center was right for them. Regardless, they realized they wanted the benefit of workflow standardization in their Data Center implementation.
Another upside to standardized workflows: you’re no longer constantly falling back on the use of additional add-ons/scripts. That can translate into cost-savings, and overall, a better-designed application.
We commonly get questions from corporate security teams when it comes to the Cloud platform/services security. In fact, platform security is handled in two ways by Atlassian for its Cloud products.
The first is authentication. Who is this person? Can we confirm this person is who he says he is? This type of authentication is delegated to a company’s IT systems to provide single sign-on (SSO) and authentication.
The second step is authorization. Now that the system has confirmed who the person is, the next question is whether this person is authorized to access Atlassian Cloud services. This is where Atlassian Access comes in.
Atlassian Access helps by integrating into Active Directory (AD), for example, to define user roles and permissions that get mapped back into the ATL deploy via the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM). This process manages the user provisioning lifecycle.
One would think that systems on-prem are more secure than those in the Cloud, but that’s not necessarily true.
From our experience, Cloud vulnerabilities are often patched relatively quickly, usually within the day. Data Center vulnerabilities, however, are often patched very slowly due to a combination of factors:
As a service provider for Atlassian Cloud, ServiceRocket is here to help you design a solution that takes full advantage of these capabilities, as well as security governance policies. We bring them all to life and make them real. It’s in these areas where we apply our experience and knowledge to ensure the most secure services in the Cloud.
Companies want to know how they can avoid unnecessary Cloud headcount costs. Having a user migration plan that takes extra care to migrate only necessary users/groups that are actually used in Jira/Confluence will help.
Also, the timeline on when to enable SSO via Atlassian Access helps avoid paying for Atlassian Access functionality while the migration is still in progress.
Another thing to keep in mind: Take advantage of Atlassian’s Dual Licensing option to run Data Center and Cloud in parallel. At this stage in the process, license your apps for Data Center but NOT for Cloud.
Finally, customers often ask how they can retain their Server capability as they move to the Cloud. Because Server licenses are perpetual, it stays active as long as you need it.
If you choose to go down this path, we suggest that you make it a read-only for reference instance.
We advise customers to try out Jira without some of these Server capabilities. Over time, you may realize that most of them are not needed in the first place. Or you may have workarounds using Cloud-based add-ons or standard feature-sets.
A successful Cloud migration requires working with an experienced partner. Our expert team at ServiceRocket can help you with valuable workarounds and change management that will help reduce costs and result in a smooth transition.
For more information or a chat, contact us at sales@servicerocket.com or visit ServiceRocket's Atlassian Cloud Knowledge Hub.
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