CLOSED: FastShift Ask Me Anything (AMA): FastShift questions answered by Atlassian Delivery Managers

[Sarah Makoski]

UPDATE: It’s a wrap for our AMA on FastShift. Thanks to everyone for taking part and sharing your questions. Be sure to stay up-to-date with the  and stay tuned for our follow-up post going into more depth with the questions raised.

---

Hi everyone!

My name is Sarah Makoski, and I’m a FastShift Enterprise Delivery Manager at Atlassian. I’m launching our first ever FastShift “Ask Me Anything” right here in the community, and I’m excited to answer your questions!

What’s FastShift?

FastShift helps eligible* customers move from Data Center to cloud at no additional cost. With hands-on guidance from Atlassian's in-house Delivery Managers and Migration Support Engineers, including help handling advanced tooling and infrastructure.

Here's how the FastShift program can benefit you:

• Get to cloud sooner: Accelerate migrations by 2-3x times, to roughly 2-6 months, with a dedicated FastShift team.
• See value from day one: Unlock cloud value faster by achieving 80-90%+ adoption rates with dedicated change management support.
• Support from experts, at no additional cost: Save time, energy, and resources to land in cloud efficiently and effectively.

*FastShift is available to customers ready to migrate within 2-6 months, supported by an executive sponsor, and who have purchased a commercial cloud license for 1,000+ seats in Jira, Jira Service Management, or Confluence. More details about how the program works and who qualifies can be found on this page.

How does this AMA work?

During the AMA, we’ll answer your FastShift-related questions, such as how the program is structured, how responsibilities are split, and how it works alongside the traditional migration process. Here are the key dates to keep track of:

AMA Opens: Now the AMA is officially open, you can begin adding questions to this community post.

AMA Live Q&A: On Wednesday, Aug 12, 2026 from 10-11am PST, I’ll be answering your questions alongside my team. Watch the page, upvote questions that interest you, and chime in with follow up questions if you’d like.

Drop your question in the comments below. Whether you’re exploring FastShift for the first time or ready to kick off your migration journey, we want to hear from you.

-Sarah and the Atlassian FastShift team

[Santosh]

Thank you, Sarah! 🙏

I'm looking for guidance on migrating our Jira and Confluence Data Center environment to Atlassian Cloud. We have a complex setup with multiple customer projects, custom workflows, fields, automations, integrations, users, attachments, and other customizations.

I'm not looking for a project plan. Rather, I'd appreciate practical, hands-on guidance on:

• Where and how to get started
• How to assess migration readiness
• How to engage users and stakeholders
• How to evaluate the Cloud experience through a trial, sandbox, or demo
• How Atlassian can support organizations with complex environments

Given the scale of our environment, I'm looking for the best starting point and recommended migration path. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Sarah Makoski]

Hi Santosh! Thank you for your thoughtful question. We’re excited to help kickstart your journey to cloud. Here are some resources and tips to help answer your questions:

• Getting started - The Cloud Migration Guide outlines the migration steps and tools available to support your journey to cloud. If you’re migrating 1,000 users or more, see if the FastShift program could be a fit for you and reach out to your Account Executive if interested.

• Migration readiness - Use Portfolio Insights to assess your Data Center environment, identify migration risks, and prioritize remediation.

• Stakeholder and user engagement - The Cloud Adoption Guide outlines the change management process, including how to engage the right stakeholders and create a robust communications plan for your users.

• Experimenting with trials, sandboxes, and demos - A free cloud migration trial lets you explore cloud features and functionality to see what’s different, build a proof of concept to demo with stakeholders, and run test migrations and user acceptance testing before go-live. For deeper testing, Premium and Enterprise plans include access to sandboxes, or isolated environments where you can run test migrations, validate data, and even promote a tested sandbox directly to production when you're ready (now in open beta).

• Complex environments - We designed the FastShift program to help complex customers migrate environments with 1,000 or more users. A dedicated Atlassian team can provide high-touch technical support ranging from over-the-shoulder, where your team runs the migration with Atlassian's guidance to hands-on backup, where you securely hand your data to Atlassian to get you migration-ready. Atlassian's ecosystem of Cloud Specialized Solution Partners and Advisory Services can provide even more support, whether you're migrating independently or already enrolled in FastShift.

We continue to share migration resources, including regularly spotlighting new enhancements to our migration tools, so ensure that you’ve joined this community to stay up-to-date with the latest materials and announcements.

[Coll_ Xavier]

Hello Sarah, thank you for this invitation.

We have many questions for the Jira/Confluence/JSM cloud migrations.

We have prepared a list of questions :

Will we have a dedicated incident manager assigned to us during our production cutover weekend?

What are the support hours (e.g., 24/7 or regional business hours) for Atlassian Support team during the months leading up to the migration?

What is the precise escalation path if a critical blocker arises during our test migrations?

How often and how quickly can we overwrite or resync our Cloud Sandboxes with fresh data from our Datacenter production systems?

Can we test full Marketplace app data migrations in the sandbox environment without pruchasing the cloud licenses?

Can we easily make configuration changes (like workflows and permission schemes) from the sandbox to production, or must they be rebuilt manually?

Jira issues mentioned in Confluence pages are they fully remapped to cloud URLs?

Will historical data such as Created By, Resolved Date, and past comment timestamps will they be preserved for all our users?

Will our team have direct, real-time access to the migration tool logs to troubleshoot errors?

What are our API rate limits in the cloud, and how do we monitor them?

What features or macros will our Confluence users lose when moving from the Confluence Datacenter to Cloud?

Does Atlassian provide end user training materials, videos, or documentation to help our teams adapt to the new Cloud UI?

How does administration governance change in the cloud? Can we still delegate project/space admin rights without granting global organization access?

Can Atlassian share us some tried & tested migration strategies used by other companies?

Can Atlassian help us prevent employees from creating unauthorized Atlassian Cloud sites using their corporate email accounts?

What happens to custom listeners and webhooks when transitioning from local Data Center events to Cloud asynchronous webhooks?

How do we migrate inactive, deactivated, or deleted user accounts without consuming billable user seats under Atlassian licensing?

Which specific back end migration path are you using for our users Database backup import or the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA)?

How does Atlassian handle the migration of Jira Service Management (JSM) internal customer accounts vs Core software users?

What are the most common database schema validation errors your team flags during the pre-migration checks for instances of our size?

Which of our critical Marketplace apps have direct cloud equivalents, and how is app data migrated?

How do we handle custom scripts, workflow rules, and post-functions that do not have a direct cloud equivalent?

How does the migration handle inactive users, duplicate email addresses, and external collaborators?

What compliance certifications and data residency requirements are guaranteed for our target cloud tier including third party partners ?

What is the projected cutover window and expected system downtime during the final production migration?

What specific runbook support and post-launch troubleshooting will Atlassian engineers provide directly?

What organisational changes or governance adjustments do you recommend after migration?

How are Incidents handled in Atlassian Cloud, and who will support us through?

What are the pre migration activities mandatory on the DC editions before going to Atlassian Cloud?

How will Atlassian communicate Cloud related incidents, outages, and service updates to our team after we migrate to Cloud?

[Sarah Makoski]

Hi Xavier,

Thank you for these questions! This is a great variety of topics. Many of these touch on themes we hear frequently from customers, and we want to make sure we are thorough in our responses. To be sure we give your questions the space they need for responses, we’re putting together a dedicated community post where we'll address your questions in depth, and I’ll link that here when it’s published! In the meantime, we've pulled together some resources below that speak to several of the topics you raised:

• Migration planning and readiness - The Cloud Migration Guide outlines the migration steps and tools available, including readiness checks with Portfolio Insights, to support your journey to cloud.

• FastShift planning, support, and escalation - The FastShift program is here to support you throughout the whole migration journey from planning to adoption. We’ll be addressing your questions in more detail in a follow-up post, and in the meantime, we encourage you to connect with us directly through your Account Executive.

• Sandbox testing - The Sandbox support documentation covers a lot of information about setting up, modifying, and copying over data to sandboxes.

• Data integrity post-migration - Learn about what migrated with the JCMA and CCMA, plus trust that there are a number of post-migration tasks that the FastShift team will help guide you through.

• Marketplace apps on cloud - You can explore cloud alternatives to Data Center marketplace apps and learn about the process for assessing and preparing Marketplace apps for migration.

• End-user adoption - The cloud adoption toolkit is a great place to learn about which materials are available to support your team’s transition onto cloud, and our cloud adoption guide includes a robust communications plan with templates to prepare your users.

Thanks again for your interest and great questions! Please stay tuned for our follow-up community post where we’ll share more in-depth responses. In the meantime, the best next step is to connect with us directly through your Account Executive so we can answer your questions with a full understanding of your instance. We’ll review your account details, assess the size and complexity of your environment, and develop a tailored migration plan, including timelines, support options, and risk-mitigation strategies. Looking forward to hearing from you!