The ultimate guide to migrating at scale
The ultimate guide to migrating at scale
to migrating at scale
What to expect when migrating your enterprise
to Atlassian Cloud
Table of contents
4 Executive summary
8 Cloud apps
10 Unlimited sites
16 Migration tooling
32 Phased
40 Phase 2: Plan
More and more of you are migrating your self-managed products to Atlassian
Cloud. And while many of you are excited to unlock the innovation that
Atlassian Cloud can provide your organization, it isn’t always clear how to
make the move.
Most of you have done some type of migration. You’ve probably had some that
have gone smoothly and others that were a bit bumpier. However, it’s often
the bumpy ones that we remember. And, as the people who are responsible
for carrying out a successful migration, those experiences can impact your
perception of what a migration might look like.
But no two migrations are the same. While there are important lessons that
you can take from your past experiences, using them to guide your approach to
an Atlassian Cloud migration isn’t always the best way forward. So, we’ve put
together this comprehensive guide - to walk you through what you can expect
when you make the move to Cloud.
to your teams.
This includes:
Server is the standard edition of our self-managed products, which you host
and run on your own hardware. Architecturally, when your teams are accessing
their applications, their requests are sent directly to your server, which is why
maintaining and optimizing the performance of your infrastructure is critical
as your teams grow.
Data Center is our self-managed enterprise edition built to meet the complex
needs of growing enterprises. Like Server, you can host your products on your
own hardware, or leverage a cloud provider. To help maintain the reliability and
availability of your products, you can also choose to deploy them in a clustered
architecture - adding additional infrastructure components to distribute your
user traffic.
You’ve all seen value in our self-managed products because they enable you
to maintain full control over your environment so you can meet your business
requirements. But, it also means that you’re responsible for servicing and
maintaining the infrastructure needed to support your products at scale. This,
of course, can lead to increased IT overhead and resource consumption.
Atlassian Cloud is our SaaS offering. Unlike self-managed where you manage
the infrastructure yourself, Atlassian hosts and maintains the performance,
availability, and reliability of your products. In short, we take on the
infrastructure and operational aspect of your product administration so that
you can focus on keeping your teams productive.
As you’re learning more about Cloud, it’s important that you understand
what comes with each plan so that you can choose the one that meets
your requirements.
Here’s a list of the top differences between our Standard, Premium, and
Enterprise plans.
Subscription Subscription
Atlassian Access Included
required required
Admin insights —
Sandboxes —
Release tracks —
Encryption in transit
and at rest
Audit logs
IP allowlisting —
Data residency
250 GB file
Storage Unlimited Unlimited
storage
Guaranteed uptime
— 99.9% 99.95%
SLA
Centralized per-user
— —
licensing
For more information on features or to learn more about the innovation that
we’re building in our Cloud products, check out our whitepaper – Server to
Cloud: why make the move
· Do you require an isolated sandbox to test apps and previous changes to your
Cloud instance?
· Do you need to test new features before rolling them out on production?
For enterprises, both the Premium and Enterprise Cloud plans offer enterprise-
grade capabilities. However, we recommend Enterprise Cloud if your organization:
1. Has, or plans to, standardize their Atlassian products across the organization
The reason: our Enterprise Cloud plan gives you access to unlimited sites and
Atlassian Access, which aren’t available in Premium. To help you better understand
how these features could be used, let’s dive into each in a bit more detail.
Unlimited sites
With most of our Cloud plans, a subscription grants you access to one instance
of your products. This is similar to what you have on Server or Data Center
today - your instances operate independently of each other and require you to
pay per user per instance. But as more organizations are shifting to the Cloud,
they’re seeing a lot of value in being able to centralize or decentralize their
administration depending on their business needs.
Enterprise Cloud removes those limitations. With unlimited sites, you can have
as many sites as your organization needs to meet your needs. Here are some
common examples of multi-sites in action.
Within each of your sites, you can have up to 20,000 users, so this capability also
enables larger teams to embrace Cloud, while making more strategic choices
on how products and data are architected. It also grants teams the autonomy
to use apps that are specific to their role. While some apps may be used widely
across your entire organization, others may be specific to certain teams, so you
pick and choose what apps you want to be available to each of your sites.
You can think of Atlassian Access as the tool that bridges the gap between
your Atlassian products and your identity management providers (IdPs). It
gives you a single place to view and manage all of your users and product
instances and enforce your company’s security policies (including SSO).
For those of you using Opsgenie, Access works on Opsgenie instances that
are on an Atlassian account. Because these users are typically associated
with some of your other Atlassian products, such as Jira Software or Jira
Service Management, they’re already counted as users within Access.
Our SAML API enables us to support nearly all SAML providers, but we offer
more streamlined integrations with:
· Microsoft ADFS
For those using Google Workspace, there is an option that forces your teams
to use the social login button.
We support nearly all cloud identity providers through our customer SCIM API.
However, the integration is more streamlined with:
· OneLogin · PingFederate
You can also create a custom SCIM integration that allows you to integrate
with nearly any provider manually.
For Google Workspace, you can sync users from selected groups, revoke
site access, and deactivate Atlassian accounts if a user has been deleted or
suspended from your workspace.
Auditing logging
Track events that occur within your organization and
Organization
across your sites to maintain your compliance position,
insights
along with user activity and license consumption.
CASB integrations
Audit logs provide a digital record of everything that’s happening within your
instance. Because Cloud is more interconnected, these audit logs are pulled at
the organization level, which means that you can see what’s happening across
all of your sites and instances.
You can also leverage the McAfee MVISION Cloud and Atlassian Access
integration for greater protection of your important data and increased
protection from threats through activity monitoring.
API token Manage the users within your organization who have
controls API access
Your teams can create an API token to authenticate a script or process from
their Atlassian account.
To ensure that your security needs are met, you can see exactly what API
tokens a user has created and manage them directly from their user account.
With Atlassian Access, you can ensure that your user management needs
are met.
You may be using multiple Atlassian products as part of your tech stack.
While we do provide a number of resources and tools to help you migrate your
products to Cloud, the type of support we provide does vary by product.
First, you’ll have a dedicated Cloud migration manager (CMM). Once you’ve
committed to planning your migration by submitting a MOVE ticket, CMM will
be with you throughout the entire migration. They help:
In short, they’re the person that keeps your migration on track and ensures
that you’ve picked the right options to meet your needs.
And for those that don’t have a TAM, a sales engineer (SE) may be brought in
to help you assess your needs, answer any technical questions that you may
have surrounding your migration, and ensure that the right technical solutions
are in place so that your needs are met.
To help you execute the migration, you’ll have a migration support engineer by
your side to help you test your migration before you roll it out on production.
They’ll be helping you run your pre-migration testing. If there are areas that
require additional technical support during the planning and prep stages of
your migration, your CMM may bring them in to provide a consultation.
Note
Migration tooling
Your dedicated team of Atlassians will help you on the road to success, but
migrating data and identifying the apps that you want to take with you can
be a manual process without the right tools. We’ve all been there and want
to make this process as smooth as possible for you, which is why we built our
migration assistants.
The Jira Software and Confluence migration assistants help you migrate
multiple projects, spaces, and users from your self-managed products to Cloud
all at once. And if that wasn’t enough, they provide visibility into the migration
process by walking you through each step along the way.
We’re always iterating on these so that they can migrate more of your
data. Currently, we’re working on building migration support for:
· Advanced Roadmaps
· Team Calendars
· Questions
For all you Bitbucket users out there, the Bitbucket Cloud migration
assistant is in the works. Keep an eye on our roadmap for the latest.
While your migration team can also help you finalize the app assessment,
they don’t have visibility into your app data, which means that you’ll need to
work with your app vendors to understand what the migration path looks like.
However, we’re working in collaboration with our Marketplace partners to add
the ability to migrate app data using our migration assistant tools.
We are continuously working with app vendors to make the app migration
process easier for you. Read our post to learn more about the time frames
in which we’re rolling these out.
Work with your IT team to take stock of all the Atlassian products - and by
extension the instances - that you have. You’ll want to be able to answer the
following questions:
· Are they all self-managed, or do you already have some Cloud products?
· How many employees are using each product and for what purpose?
· Are there any instances you weren’t previously aware of? If so, do you plan
on keeping them alongside your Cloud site, or archiving them?
· Have you built customizations into Atlassian products? How often do you
or your team maintain workflows and custom fields in your instances?
You’ll also want to use this as an opportunity to look critically at your app
usage. While we’ve continued to add more and more apps to our ecosystem,
not every app has a Cloud equivalent today. So, there may be some apps that
you don’t want to migrate or different apps that you’ll want to leverage as
part of your migration.
At this stage, interviewing your teams will be extremely useful because Cloud
migrations don’t just impact IT. We’re all creatures of habit and change can
be hard. Getting buy-in from your teams is what’s going to make your Cloud
migration truly successful. It’s the pivotal - what’s in it for me - moment.
Using the data that you collected in your audit, interview your teams to
understand how they’re using them. Ask your teams to share how they’re
using the products day-to-day, if they have any pain points that they’re
experiencing, or if there are certain features that are important to them. The
team innovation we’ve built-in Cloud may already address these concerns or
be on the roadmap, so you can get them excited about what’s on the horizon.
Succcess checklist
F Review how Cloud meets your enterprise needs
Your team of Atlassians will help you through this assessment, but you might
be curious what types of questions they’ll ask. We’ve pulled together this
handy list, along with some resources that you can use to further investigate.
Based on the number of users you have and business requirements, do you need
Enterprise Cloud so that you can federate your instances?
Are you planning on consolidating any of your instances into one site?
What are your compliance requirements? Do you have any regulatory needs for
your data?
· Because Atlassian is managing your instances, it’s our responsibility that you
remain in compliance. Review the Trust site and compliance reports to ensure
that your compliance requirements are met.
· Note, while we do meet most requirements today, our Cloud products do not
meet PCI or HIPAA requirements. If you’re storing this type of data in your
products, you would not want to migrate this instance to Cloud. Read our blog
to learn more about administering between multiple platforms.
What are your security needs and do you need to complete a security review?
· We know that many of you have vendor risk assessments that you need to
complete. You can submit your questions and our support engineers will help
you answer them, or leverage our pre-filled questionnaires with answers to the
most common security questions.
Do you have any customizations that you’ve built on Server or Data Center?
User Management
Are you part of the organization that manages all of your company’s users?
Data locality
Ultimately, it comes down to whether all of your instances have these data
requirements or just some of them. For example, your legal team may use a
separate Confluence instance and the data in that instance might need to be
fully under your control for privacy reasons. Although it might be impossible
for you to move that team’s Atlassian instance to Cloud, it may be possible for
you to move other teams over to Cloud - especially those who don’t have the
same strict data privacy requirements.
There are two parts to this: setting up your organization and claiming
your domain.
To set up your organization, we recommend that you use our free Cloud
migration trial. Each trial lasts up to 12 months and matches the remaining
duration and user tier of your current self-managed license. It’s designed
specifically to help you explore, evaluate, test, and migrate your instances over
time - without disrupting your teams.
Once you have your organization in place, you need to verify your company’s
domain to claim your managed user accounts. You can do this by either
uploading an HTML file to the root folder of your domain’s website (HTTPS), or
you can copy a TXT record to your domain name system (DNS). You’ll then see
all of your managed accounts within your organization’s admin console.
They are right alongside your Atlassian migration team throughout the entire
process. That means that they’re helping us work with you to do the planning
and migration prep to determine what strategy will work best for you. They’ll
also work with any other Atlassian teams that you may need to engage with,
as well as app vendors.
If that wasn’t enough, they’ve done these migrations before and they know
what it takes to successfully make the move.
“ Igood
can’t stress enough the importance of having a
quality partner. Building a relationship with our
partners is what got us over the line.
AFTERPAY
With a deadline in mind, your CMM will work backward from that date you’ve
provided, factor in the support you have, and build out your full timeline.
Don’t forget to consider renewal dates and the end of Server support, as you
will want to optimize where possible to ensure there is no disruption in
your service.
Your team at Atlassian will help you decide what strategy will work best
based on your timeline and requirements, but this is a breakdown of the
strategies that you can use as part of your Cloud migration.
Migration
Migration Assistant or site import
method
Your organization has the time and resources to clean up your instance prior
to your migration. Most organizations are carrying around a lot of enterprise
baggage - the data and users that just never got removed from the instance.
Moving to Cloud is your opportunity to start over and get rid of the baggage
that may be bogging you down.
Pro tip
Migration
Migration Assistant or site import
method
If your organization is looking to move to the Cloud and you don’t want to
spend time upfront cleaning up your instance, this option will enable you to
migrate at a faster rate.
Your organization has business requirements that won’t enable you to have
long periods of downtime, or you have complex, large data shapes that can’t
be migrated during one single migration window.
How this Leave your data behind in your self-managed instance and
method works only bring users and workflows.
Migration
Migration Assistant or site import
method
You don’t need access to your existing Server data, you’re spinning up a brand
new team, or you’re expediting your move to Cloud. This option can also
enable teams to streamline their Cloud footprint and implement new ways
of work.
Next, you’ll work together to draft your test strategy. There are some tests that
we know you’ll need to run depending on the migration strategy, but we’ll also
add tests based on your setup and requirements.
At this time, you’ll also need to provide a ZIP file that contains your instance
data. On our end, we’ll run through checks to mitigate any issues during
the actual migration process. While we can’t run all the checks on our end,
our support engineers will provide comments and feedback to help identify
any outstanding checks that you need to do on your end. This will all be
documented in your runbook.
Your runbook should be your source of truth. Your support engineer will
be adding resources providing details while you do the same. This will
provide your IT team with the full migration picture.
The last step is to execute your test migration. Work with your support
engineer to align on the date and time you’re running your test. As you’re going
through each of the tasks, you’ll want to enter the amount of time that it
took (we’ll do the same on our end). Don’t forget to document challenges and
roadblocks, as they will be extremely helpful for your production runbook.
With this final bit of information in hand, fine-tune your production migration
plans and you’re off to the races.
For the past five years, Cando has used Jira Software Server to track the
software development work that they do for their website and Confluence
Server for all of their internal collaboration. Over the past five years, the
organization has gone from 250 team members to 15,000. Gaby and Alyssa,
the company’s senior admins, have spent considerable people hours and
budget building an infrastructure that can remain performant at scale, but
Cando’s organizational growth isn’t in line with what their existing on-prem
infrastructure can handle and their teams are starting to suffer.
With Atlassian announcing their end of Server support, Maggie has reached
out to Gaby and Alyssa to understand their options. While they know they can
continue to run on-prem with Data Center, they’re also aware that Atlassian
is building more innovation in Cloud. And while Maggie has also expressed
interest in adopting a cloud-first strategy moving forward, Cando has specific
data requirements that must be taken into account as they make
their decision.
After reading through the site and some additional resources, they still aren’t
sure if Cloud is right for them. They decide to fill out the contact form to get
more information from Atlassian. Jacob - an enterprise advocate (EA) - reaches
out to them.
To kick off the conversation, Jacob walks them through the investments
that Atlassian is making for both teams and admins - and specifically how
Atlassian is meeting their enterprise requirements. After hearing more about
Cloud, Gaby and Alyssa both feel like it’s the right move for their organization.
Now, Maggie needs to ensure that this works within their budget.
Jacob schedules a call with Gaby, Alyssa, and Maggie where he walks them
through the total cost of ownership (TCO) and what their return on investment
(ROI) could be by making the move to the Cloud. While the initial investment
seems high, Maggie can see that over time, infrastructure costs and licensing
fees make Cloud a much better option for Cando.
While Maggie is keen to move forward with the migration, Alyssa and Gaby
still have more questions about the migration process, such as what plan
they need, how does user management work, and if they will need to make
changes to their current setup before migration to Cloud. To address these
questions, Jacob brings in Abby, the sales engineer (SE).
Before they give their final recommendation to Maggie, Gaby and Alyssa want
to understand what support and tools they need to execute their move. Jacob
walks them through what Atlassian provides them, including a CMM and
migration support engineer.
He also uses this opportunity to talk more about the Jira Cloud Migration
Assistant (JCMA) and the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant (CCMA),
which they could leverage to migrate their data from Server to Cloud. He also
mentions that site import is another option available, but the CMM assigned
to our MOVE ticket will be able to help them decide on what tools and overall
strategy make the most sense for their organization.
So, they reach out to Cloud Movers, who assigns Jess to work with them.
Throughout their initial call, Gaby and Alyssa have the opportunity to get a
sense of how Jess will work with them and Atlassian to help migrate their
data, but they require a statement of work that they can share with Maggie.
Jess works on drafting this up so that Cando can move forward.
After gathering all of this information, Gaby and Alyssa can go to Maggie
to move forward with the migration. Jacob stays with them throughout the
purchase process to ensure that Cando’s needs are met.
Phase 2: Plan
They’re now ready to move forward and begin working with Atlassian to plan
their migration. They submit a MOVE request, which is sent to the CMMs.
Gaby and Alyssa know that they need to do an official security audit. They
submit a copy of their questions to Atlassian to respond. They promptly send
responses back and they’re satisfied that Cloud meets their
security requirements.
The next step is to figure out how running multiple sites will impact their
migration and how to better prepare. Hosana recommends completing the
tenant mapping exercise to plot out what users will go to each site. In the
end, Alyssa and Gaby decide that they need a site for their development team,
sales, and marketing.
Hosana recommends that they leverage JCMA and CCMA for their migration
and that they use a lift and shift strategy, where they migrate their entire
Jira Software instance at one time and then move their Confluence instance
shortly after.
Based on the strategy, method, and their partner, they feel comfortable
migrating their Jira Software instance over Memorial Day weekend and
Confluence will be two weeks after that over the weekend.
Last, but not least, they align with Maggie one more time to review the
timeline and confirm that they are good to move forward.
They provide Brian with a ZIP file containing their data, which Brian uses to run
through the migration checks before the official move. He gives some feedback
on what they can do to optimize their data pre-migration and documents
everything in the runbook.
The last thing that Alyssa and Gaby need to do is test their migration. They run
through the entire process and document the time it takes and highlight any
challenges they experience. This data is sent back to Brian to use as part of the
official migration.