Administration expenses switching from Cloud to Server

Question

Hey there,

we are currently using the Atlassian Cloud for Jira / Confluence / Service Desk where I am the admin of the site. We have about 50 users at the moment and I'm doing the administration in Addition to the IT Infrastructure administration. It's currently about 60:40 (60% Jira, 40% rest)

Since we may have to switch to the server version of Jira i was just wondering if administrating the server version can still be done "besides the rest" or will it be far more to do than if you "just" have to administer the cloud.

bg

Ismael Jimoh · Accepted Answer

Hi @Marco

Administering JIRA server would be slightly more, based on a few things:

* Outages: You would need to handle all outages yourself and ensure the server is up and running. Atlassian Cloud would normally help you look at this. However if you are unsure, you can use this community or even Atlassian support site for assistance.
* Upgrades: With careful planning, JIRA upgrades can be scheduled to not interrupt other works and should fit nicely into your 60%. However, I add it here because Atlassian used to provide this out of the box.
* Security notes and patches: As a server JIRA admin, I believe this is where you would spend a good deal of time. You would need to do a lot of reading and following various mediums to ensure you are not impacted by any security bugs or patches both from Atlassian and other services running on your JIRA server. 
As much time as possible should be delegated to this because you would not want to be caught by surprise at any point. This is doubly important when hosting the service in house as Atlassian used to cover all of these priorly for you.

So what does the current workload look like from the above would depend on how stable your servers are and how well you plan upgrades and maintenance of your JIRA (including JIRA Service Desk) and confluence services.

I hope this helps.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

There is be a lot more to do as an admin on a Server version, as you have to do all the system admin as well as Jira admin.  But if you have a system where people are not going to ask much more of you, then the extra admin will mostly be in the getting it set up, upgrades and the monitoring you should do to make sure it's running smoothly (those are the three main things you don't need to do on Cloud).

Anecdotally, although there is more server admin, many people have told me that Server is easier to use than Cloud, and admin overhead from training and explaining were measurably lower after a move to to Server.