Safe and Compliant Cloud Migration: How Migration and Backup Work Together in High-Compliance Indust
Why Cloud Migration Matters
For many organisations, the cloud has become an increasingly important part of their technology strategy. According to Atlassian, more than 90% of new customers today choose cloud solutions when implementing their tools. This trend also explains why migrating to the cloud has become a common question for companies evaluating their long-term IT strategy. Thousands of organisations – from fast-growing startups to global enterprises such as Rockwell Automation, Nextiva, Redfin, Major League Baseball, Unilever, and Renault – have recently completed Atlassian server to cloud migration, moving from self-hosted environments to modern cloud platforms.
Cloud environments allow teams to adapt faster, reduce infrastructure overhead, and support global collaboration without the complexity of maintaining on-premise systems. For many companies, Atlassian cloud migration also simplifies system administration, improves scalability, and enables access to new cloud-only features and integrations.
Customer feedback reinforces this shift. In a survey conducted among migrated users, 90% said they would recommend Atlassian’s cloud products, while 89% reported realising the benefits of cloud migration in less than six months. These results, based on a TechValidate survey of nearly 300 Atlassian users, highlight how quickly organisations can start seeing value after moving to the cloud. When evaluating migration strategies, organisations also often analyse Atlassian Cloud pricing to better understand the long-term cost structure compared to maintaining on-premise infrastructure.
Cloud migration is increasingly becoming a priority for organisations as technology strategies evolve and vendor timelines approach. Atlassian has announced that license sales for existing Data Centre customers will end on March 30, 2028, while full support and maintenance will end on March 28, 2029. These milestones make it important for companies to begin planning their Atlassian Cloud migration strategies well in advance. If you are considering this transition, you can learn more about our migration services here.
For organisations operating in highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, or legal, cloud migration is about more than scalability or operational efficiency. These industries must ensure strict data protection, regulatory compliance, auditability, and access control, which makes the migration process significantly more complex than in less regulated environments.
In this article, we will take a closer look at cloud migration in high-compliance industries, exploring the key benefits, potential risks, and the role of backup in ensuring a secure and compliant transition.
Key Compliance Challenges During Cloud Migration
In a world where cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, it is important to have a safe and low-risk way to protect data. When companies move to the cloud, they need strong protection. Atlassian Cloud provides secure data storage with enterprise-level data protection features and practices. Based on our experience, Softgile also sees these trends clearly through real client cases, where companies increasingly prioritise security and risk reduction during cloud migration.
An Atlassian study shows that 94% of technology leaders reported better security after moving to cloud solutions.
Traditional on-premise architecture usually has a single entry point. This can increase security risks. Atlassian Cloud uses a zero-trust security model. This model checks and re-checks user credentials at several stages. These checks help detect security breaches faster. They also reduce the impact of successful attacks.
Another Atlassian study shows that 48% of developers do not have enough time to focus on security issues. For this reason, stronger security layers are more important than ever.
But security alone is not enough. When companies move to the cloud, they also face important compliance challenges:
- Moving data to the cloud can take it to different countries, and this can create legal challenges. Laws like GDPR require companies to handle personal data carefully when it crosses borders. Atlassian helps customers by using Standard Contractual Clauses and providing a Data Transfer Impact Assessment, so businesses can trust that international data transfers follow the law.
- In the cloud, your data may also be processed by partner companies. Not all partners automatically follow strict privacy rules, which can be a compliance risk. Atlassian solves this by checking all sub-processors, signing strong agreements, and making sure each partner passes a thorough compliance review. This gives companies confidence that third-party risks are managed safely.
- Regulations sometimes require data to stay in a specific country or region, which can be tricky during cloud migration. Atlassian allows customers to “pin” data to a chosen location while still optimising hosting for global performance. This helps businesses follow local laws without losing the benefits of cloud services.
- Cyberattacks can happen at any time, and laws require strong protection of personal data. Atlassian encrypts data both during transfer and while it is stored, and follows enterprise-grade security practices. This reduces the risk of breaches and lets customers feel confident that their information is safe.
- Governments may sometimes request access to user data, and companies must be transparent about this. Atlassian publishes a Transparency Report and clear guidelines on how it responds to law enforcement requests. This allows organisations to monitor access and maintain regulatory compliance.
- Finally, users have rights over their personal information. Laws like GDPR let them see, delete, or move their data. Atlassian provides simple tools for deletion, access, and data export, making it easy for companies to respect user rights and follow privacy regulations.
Cloud Migration Strategy: How to Move Safely and Efficiently
Below, you will learn how to migrate to the cloud step by step: how to prepare, move your data and teams safely and efficiently, and train users to work with the new platform.
Assessment
Start by evaluating if the cloud is the right fit for your team. Look at the benefits it can bring, such as faster updates, scalability, and easier collaboration. This step helps you set clear expectations for the migration outcome and forms the first part of how to migrate to the cloud successfully.
Planning
Decide on your migration strategy and create a detailed timeline. Identify which teams and systems will move first. Planning ensures that the process is organised and avoids surprises.
Preparation
Prepare your data and teams for the migration. Clean up old files and review permissions to prevent issues. Make sure everyone knows their role and responsibilities during the move.
Testing
Test your migration on a small scale before the full move. Check that all data transfers correctly and resolve any issues early. Testing reduces the risk of problems during the actual migration.
Migration
This is the actual move to the cloud. Schedule downtime if needed and follow your migration plan carefully. This step is the last major interruption your team will experience.
Launch
Once migration is complete, train your teams on the new platform. Explore cloud-only features that can improve productivity. Continuous learning helps your team get the most value from the cloud.
The role of backup and data protection
Even with strong cloud security and compliance frameworks, organisations in regulated industries cannot rely on a single layer of protection. Data loss can still occur due to human error, misconfigured permissions, application failures, or malicious activity. In many compliance frameworks, maintaining reliable backup and recovery capabilities is not only recommended but required.
Don’t take our words for granted:
“… the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including inter alia as appropriate: … the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident..” - Art. 32 GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
or
“12.10.1 An incident response plan exists and is ready to be activated in the event of a suspected or confirmed security incident. The plan includes, but is not limited to…. Business recovery and continuity procedures. Data backup processes….” - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, PCI DSS
or
“The company performs daily backups and tests recovery periodically” - Annex A.12.3 (Backup) ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27001
When organisations migrate to the cloud, they often assume that the cloud provider fully protects their data. However, most cloud platforms operate under a shared responsibility model. Here, it’s the Atlassian Cloud Security Shared Responsibility Model. While the provider secures the infrastructure, customers remain responsible for protecting their own data, managing access, and ensuring proper recovery procedures are in place.
For high-compliance industries such as healthcare, finance, and legal services, backup solutions play several critical roles.
Regulatory compliance and audit readiness
Many regulations require organisations to maintain recoverable copies of critical information. For example, financial regulations often mandate long-term data retention. Thus, the backup solution must allow for keeping data for a longer time - for 5, 10 years, or even indefinitely. This way, a dedicated backup system can help organisations demonstrate compliance during audits and maintain clear recovery procedures if needed.
Protection against human error
One of the most common causes of data loss is accidental deletion or incorrect configuration. Even in highly controlled environments, users may unintentionally remove important information. Backup solutions allow organisations to restore individual items, projects, or entire datasets without disrupting daily operations.
What’s important is that the backup solution that organisations in highly-regulated industries choose allows them to keep data in a few storage destinations, like the Cloud and local. In this way, organisations can make sure that it is one of the storage destinations, and they can always restore their data from the additional storage. It will help them to prove that they are ready for any disaster scenario, minimising or even eliminating data loss.
Ransomware and cybersecurity resilience
Cyberattacks remain a major concern for regulated sectors. Moreover, they lead to great expenses… According to Viking Cloud predictions, the cybercrime costs are expected to increase to around $14 trillion by 2028. Now, the ransomware attacks can cost organisations an average of $1.85 million per incident.
In the event of ransomware or unauthorised data modification, backups provide a clean recovery point. This ensures organisations can restore systems quickly and maintain operational continuity without paying attackers or risking permanent data loss. Thus, the backup solution should allow organisations to restore their data to the same or a new environment (Jira or Bitbucket), or cross-platform restore, e.g., from Bitbucket to GitLab, GitHub, Azure DevOps (both cloud and on-prem), or vice versa.
Operational continuity and disaster recovery
Business continuity is critical in industries where downtime can affect financial transactions, healthcare services, or legal processes. Reliable backup strategies allow organisations to recover quickly from outages, system failures, or migration-related issues.
Secure migration support
Backup is also an important safety mechanism during the migration process itself. Before large-scale data transfers begin, it’s a good practice for organisations to create backup snapshots of their existing environments. This ensures that if unexpected issues occur during migration, data can be restored without significant disruption. For example, during the Bitbucket DC to Bitbucket Cloud migration.
For companies performing cloud migrations, backup should not be treated as an afterthought. Instead, it should be integrated into the overall migration and compliance strategy. A well-designed backup solution can help organisations maintain control over their data while still benefiting from the scalability and flexibility of cloud platforms.
More than security alone…
Cloud migration is no longer simply a technology upgrade – it has become a strategic transformation for organisations seeking scalability, collaboration, and operational efficiency. As more companies transition from on-premise environments to cloud platforms, planning a secure and compliant migration process is essential.
For industries operating under strict regulatory frameworks, the migration journey can require careful attention to data protection, privacy regulations, and audit requirements. Challenges such as cross-border data transfers, third-party processing, regional data residency, and cybersecurity threats must all be addressed to ensure compliance.
At the same time, cloud platforms like Atlassian Cloud provide advanced security models, strong encryption practices, and transparency mechanisms that help organisations manage these challenges more effectively than traditional on-premise infrastructure.
However, security and compliance cannot rely on platform protections alone. A comprehensive migration strategy must also include reliable backup and recovery mechanisms. Why? Backup solutions provide an additional safety layer that protects against accidental data loss, cyberattacks, and operational disruptions while supporting regulatory requirements for data retention and recoverability.
When migration planning, cloud security, and backup strategies work together, organisations can move to the cloud with confidence. For companies in high-compliance industries, this integrated approach ensures they gain the advantages of cloud technology while maintaining the security, transparency, and regulatory control their industries demand.
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The article was written in collaboration between Softgile and GitProtect.
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