Migration

[Utkarsh Chandel]

To ensure a successful transition, what specific data hygiene steps must an enterprise include in its pre-migration checklist, and what security standard should be prioritized when selecting a vendor to maintain trust?

[Kevin Kadakas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Utkarsh Chandel ,

Great question!

Data hygiene in the pre-migration phase is what separates a smooth Cloud migration from a painful one. Aligning with Atlassian’s Assess and Plan phases, here’s what should be included in your checklist:

1. Audit your users

Deactivate inactive accounts, resolve duplicates, and make sure every user has a unique, valid email. Cloud uses email as the primary identifier, so this directly affects both licensing and your identity setup. This part can be done with Migration Assistant mostly

2. Audit your apps

List every installed Marketplace app and check whether each has:

• A Cloud version
• A viable alternative
• A migration path

App count is directly correlated to migration complexity, so this is where you decide what stays and what goes.

3. Assess size and complexity of data

Review project, space, and attachment volume. Archive obsolete Jira projects and Confluence spaces before migrating.

Less data means:

• A shorter cutover window
• A cleaner Cloud instance

4. Clean up customizations

Consolidate custom fields, workflows, screens, and issue types. Enterprises commonly carry hundreds of unused custom fields, which bloat the Cloud schema and slow performance.

5. Validate data integrity

Run Jira’s integrity checker, resolve database inconsistencies, and back up your instance.

On vendor security standards

For Atlassian itself, review the Atlassian Trust Center at atlassian.com/trust, where SOC 2 Type II and CSA STAR reports are published.

For Marketplace apps, prioritize apps with the “Runs on Atlassian” badge whenever the use case allows. Those apps run entirely on Forge inside Atlassian’s infrastructure, so they inherit Atlassian’s compliance posture and cannot send data outside the ecosystem.

When that’s not possible, check for:

• Cloud Fortified status
• The vendor’s privacy and security policy on the Marketplace listing

Hope this helps! If it did, please mark it as the accepted answer so others with the same question can find it more easily.

[Dr_ Ankita Mehta-OpsHub_ Inc · Accepted solution]

Hi @Utkarsh Chandel

For enterprise migration, data hygiene before the move is just as important as the migration tool itself. These specific steps must be included:

• Review project and field setup: Decide whether to reuse existing project templates, workflows, and fields, or clean them up before moving to the new system.
• Plan mapping and transformation: Check how fields, statuses, users, permissions, formatting, relationships, and team structures will map or transform in the target environment.
• Define migration scope: Confirm what moves, such as work items, stories, bugs, sprints including rich data like comments, attachments, mentions, inline content, links, history, and add-on data.
• Assess downtime and collaboration impact: Understand whether teams need read-only mode, phased migration, or parallel work across source and target systems.
• Check compliance and vendor security: Prioritize SOC 2 Type II, along with encryption, access control, auditability, and clear data-handling practices.

 This article on Atlassian Community have detailed down the pre-migration checklist steps before adopting the new tool. Additionally, if you have a migration project ahead (Jira DC to Cloud, Jira to Jira migration, migration to JSM or more), you may consider OpsHub Migration Manager ,an Atlassian Silver Solutions partner and an enterprise-grade migration platform. It supports phased or full migrations with no downtime, no disruption, and no data loss while preserving comments, attachments, relationships, history, and field mappings. OMM also lets you transform while you migrate. 

Hope it helps! 

All the best! :) 

[Mehr_miniOrange]

Hi @Utkarsh Chandel 

Great answers from Kevin and Dr. Ankita cover the structural side of pre-migration hygiene well. One area I'd add that often gets overlooked in enterprise checklists is sensitive data embedded in ticket content itself - descriptions, comments, and attachments.

Over time, Jira instances accumulate a surprising amount of PII: customer email addresses in bug reports, credit card numbers in support tickets, national IDs or passport details in HR-adjacent projects. Once that data lands in Cloud, it's significantly harder to remediate, and you're now managing compliance obligations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS) in an environment you don't fully control. Addressing it before migration is far cleaner.

So alongside the steps already mentioned, I'd add three items to your pre-migration checklist specifically for data hygiene at the content level:

Scan ticket fields and comments for PII. Use regex-based scanning to catch emails, card numbers, phone numbers, and other sensitive patterns across your project data before the move. Don't rely on manual spot-checks since the volume at enterprise scale makes that impractical.

Audit attachments for sensitive documents. Attachments are the highest-risk category. Filter by file type and size, identify anything carrying personal data, and remove or redact before migration. This also reduces your Cloud storage footprint directly.

Run a user cleanup pass beyond just deactivating inactive accounts. Bulk removal of ghost users before migration reduces your Cloud licensing exposure from day one.

At miniroange, we built a tool specifically for this: DLP Sensitive Data Scanner for Jira, that handles the PII scanning, attachment audit, and user cleanup steps above within your Data Center instance.