The Connect Sunset Is Six Months Away. Is Your App Portfolio Ready?

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When did you last check whether your Marketplace apps are Forge-ready?

If the answer is “not recently” or “never,” this post is for you. 

Full disclosure: I work for Release Management Apps, the team behind Release Management for Jira. We completed our own Forge migration in March 2026, and the process taught us a lot about what Jira admins and IT leads should be paying attention to right now. This article is meant to share that perspective — not as a vendor pitch, but as a practical heads-up from someone who has been through it.

What the Connect Sunset Actually Means

Atlassian has set a Connect end-of-support deadline for Q4 2026. After that date, apps still built on Atlassian Connect will no longer receive platform patches or security updates from Atlassian. The apps won’t disappear overnight, but the infrastructure they depend on will stop being maintained.

In practical terms, this means:

If a Connect app has a security vulnerability after the deadline, Atlassian is not responsible for patching it. If a Jira platform update breaks a Connect integration, there is no guarantee the vendor can fix it without migrating to Forge first. And if you’re in a regulated environment — finance, healthcare, government — your compliance team will eventually ask whether your toolchain includes unsupported components. The answer matters.

This is not a theoretical risk. It is a fixed deadline on a published timeline.

Why Forge Is the Direction Atlassian Is Taking — and Why It Matters

The core difference between Connect and Forge comes down to where your data goes.

With Connect, apps run on the vendor’s own servers. When a Connect app reads your Jira data, that data leaves Atlassian’s environment and travels to wherever the vendor hosts their infrastructure. For many teams, this was an acceptable trade-off. For organizations with strict data residency or security requirements, it was always a concern.

With Forge, app code runs inside Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure. Data stays within the Atlassian environment. This is a meaningful architectural shift — not just a branding exercise. For IT leaders evaluating vendor risk, the distinction between “data leaves your environment” and “data stays within your environment” is often the difference between a straightforward procurement approval and a months-long security review.

The migration path Atlassian has defined moves through several stages:
Connect → Connect on Forge → Forge with Remotes → full “Runs on Atlassian” (zero egress).
Each stage shifts more of the app’s logic into Atlassian’s infrastructure. The final stage — “Runs on Atlassian” — means no data leaves at all.

Where Release Management for Jira Stands

Our team completed the migration to Forge with Remotes in March 2026. The process took eight months and was executed in four stages, each validated in production before moving to the next. We are now working toward the full “Runs on Atlassian” designation, which we’re targeting by August 2026.

I share this not to position us as exceptional, but because concrete timelines are useful context. An eight-month migration is not trivial. If your critical Marketplace apps haven’t started their migration yet, Q4 2026 is closer than it feels.

Three Questions to Ask Your Marketplace App Vendors Today

If you manage a Jira instance with Marketplace apps — especially in a regulated or security-conscious organization — here are three questions worth raising with every vendor in your stack:

1. “What is your current Forge migration status?” Are they still on Connect? On Forge with Remotes? Have they published a timeline? If a vendor cannot answer this clearly, that’s a data point.
2. “When do you expect to reach ‘Runs on Atlassian’?” This is the final stage — zero egress, all code within Atlassian’s infrastructure. Some vendors may not get there by Q4 2026, and that’s worth knowing upfront so you can plan accordingly.
3. “Will there be any disruption to existing users during migration?” Migrations of this scale rarely happen without some impact. Vendors who are transparent about potential disruptions and how they plan to manage them are the ones you want in your stack long-term.

Looking Ahead

The Connect sunset is not an emergency — not yet. But it is the kind of deadline that catches teams off guard if they don’t start auditing early. The best time to have the Forge conversation with your vendors is before it becomes urgent.

If you’re going through this process yourself — as an admin, as a vendor, or as someone responsible for app governance in your organization — I’m happy to share more about what we learned. Drop a comment below.