Migrating from On-Prem to Cloud: What do you wish you knew soon after migration completed?

Hi @Tricia Wegner

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Here are a few key strategy takeaways that are crucial to plan for when migrating from Jira + Confluence DC to Cloud:

• Audit & Cleanup First: Identify inactive projects/spaces and audit custom fields, workflows, and unused apps. Archiving or purging unnecessary data before running your migration will significantly reduce complexity, downtime, and sync failures.
• Run an App & Customization Assessment: Engage an Atlassian Solution Partner or use Atlassian's built-in cloud migration assistants to assess app parity. Determine which marketplace apps have direct cloud equivalents, which require alternative workflows/solutions, and which customizations might not be compatible in the Cloud environment.
• Plan for a Multi-Month Timeline: For large or highly customized environments, factor in several months for proof-of-concept (PoC) dry runs, user acceptance testing (UAT), and stakeholder sign-off.
• Incremental Confluence Migration: If you have a large Confluence Data Center environment that cannot be migrated all at once, consider using the Space Sync for Confluence app alongside the Atlassian Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant (CCMA) to synchronize spaces incrementally to the Cloud.
  
  Disclosure: I'm part of the Ricksoft team that develops and maintains this app.

Hope this helps give you a smooth migration path!

Thank you.

Hi @Tricia Wegner,

It is important to make sure you have a good overview of your DC instance's 3rd party app usage. As James pointed out, ScriptRunner can be a crucial part of your migration to Cloud.

I am from the customer success team for ScriptRunner. If your organization is indeed a user of ScriptRunner, we've built the ScriptRunner Migration Suite (SMS) to get you there safely and successfully. It covers the whole ScriptRunner migration lifecycle:

• Analyse & Assess: reviews your DC scripts and configurations and flags Cloud readiness/blockers
• Convert: turns DC scripts into Cloud-compatible code, with an AI-assisted Migration Agent for the trickier ones
• Deploy: pushes converted scripts straight to your Cloud environment (production or sandbox)

If that's relevant to you, you can raise a request with our dedicated SMS support team with this link or use the "Raise a support ticket" button in the linked SMS page.

And if ScriptRunner isn't part of your stack, no worries, just disregard this.

Best of luck!
Max

What surprises a lot of people is apps - are apps you use available on the cloud version, and do they work the same? Scriptrunner, particularly, catches people out a lot. 

Adding the post-cutover surprises, since the answers above cover the planning side well. These are the ones that tend to surface in the first weeks after go-live:

Integrations break quietly, not loudly. Anything that talked to Jira by URL or API - CI hooks, scripts, BI extracts, inbound webhooks - needs both re-pointing and re-authenticating, because Cloud uses API tokens/OAuth rather than PATs or basic auth against your own server. Inventory them before cutover; you will still be finding stragglers weeks later.

Rate limits are real. Scripts that happily hammered your on-prem box will start seeing 429s. Anything doing bulk reads or writes needs retry and backoff handling.

Automation is metered. Rule executions are capped per plan on Cloud, so heavy rules that ran free on DC can hit the monthly limit mid-month. Audit your noisiest rules early and check the usage screen after the first couple of weeks.

Email deliverability changes. Notifications now come from Atlassian's senders rather than your internal server, so corporate spam filters that trusted the old one may quarantine them. Get the new senders allowlisted before people start reporting that Jira stopped emailing them.

Backups work differently. No more scheduled XML dumps - decide your Cloud export cadence deliberately, and do one test restore so the first real one isn't also the first rehearsal.

None of these are disasters if you know they're coming. Good luck with the migration!

Hello @Tricia Wegner ! Welcome!

I think the biggest thing is that the migration is only the beginning. Your data will be there, but it will be in "a new skin".  There will be things that you could do in on-prem that you can't do in Cloud and vice versa.

Good luck!