Mitigate the risks of migrating from the Server to Cloud

Question

Hi,

Currently we migrated from Server to Cloud (Jira Software) and the problems we have are so many that this move brought down the productivity and created  much frustration among the colleagues. I wonder if there is an accurate risk assessment regarding this change and if so if this is publicly available to users of Jira Software.

Basically are there steps to follow in order to avoid all this chaos deriving from this move and based on a real running Jira case where there are more than 100K Tickets for more than 25 Projects and more than 150 Users?

Is there a forum where we can read "experience" from similar migrations at that scale?

Thanks in advance

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @Aggeliki Rabaouni . netzkern

Thank you for providing us with a detailed description of your problems.

Analyzing your description, I believe that most of the problems that happened in your migration process are caused due to some ignored preparation steps required for the migration. The first one that I could clearly identify was that you must upgrade your Jira Server license to 7.13 or higher before the migration to Cloud, as described in the documentation below:

Supported versions for Jira Cloud site import

If the pre-requisite above is not fulfilled, there is no way to know what kind of errors and data will be missing in your migration, and that is even more impactful if you have a large amount of data in your Server.

Additionally, you must ensure you have followed all the pre-requisites steps of the documentation below to make sure your migration happens in a smooth way:

Jira pre-migration checklist

The checklist in the documentation above will ensure your users, permissions, attachments, and the whole environment are ready to be migrated.

If you need any further guidance to achieve any of the pre-requisites above, you can contact our migration team using the following form:

Atlassian migration support

Let us know if you have any questions.

Aggeliki Rabaouni . netzkern · Answer

Hi Peter,

I read about the Migration assistant but unfortunately does not support the Software Version we had for Jira Server. (7.1.9)

Yes I can name some of the problems we have.

- All workflows were lost for all Projects

- All Users (Assignees, Reporters etc.) were lost as well and replaced with "Former User" One programmer of ours wrote a script to reinstate Only the Assignees and after two days we still receive ALL the tickets we used to be assigned to since the day one we started using Jira. Some of us received tickets which belong to Projects never worked for. Our Mailbox was suddenly overflown with these tickets.

- The attachments cannot be displayed anymore and even download any more. So for all the tickets we work on we need to add again the attachments and sometimes the next day we have the same problem

- The permissions were lost. That said no one could do anything and the Scrummys tried to fix that for all members of the teams. The load of work on top of our daily workload was immense.

- For several type of Tickets we lost the settings of the standard fields we use. For example for the Bug Tickets we could not use default fields (default for the Project) that we used to have like "Devices" and so on.

- The plugins we added do not work as they suppose to work. At least there are issues (but I think this is a tool /plug in issue)

These are some of the problems we had and I am sure that other user with different permissions had other problems as well.

Thank you for help in advance,

Aggeliki

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @Aggeliki Rabaouni . netzkern

Welcome to the Atlassian Community. Sorry to hear you've faced problems with the migration to Cloud.

In order to help you better understand and solve the problems you are currently facing, could you please give us a detailed description of each lack derived from the cloud move that is currently affecting your team?

About your first question:

Basically, are there steps to follow in order to avoid all this chaos deriving from this move and based on a real running Jira case where there are more than 100K Tickets for more than 25 Projects and more than 150 Users?

We have the following documentation that provides you with all the requirements and considerations you must know about the Cloud migration:

Introducing the Atlassian Migration Program

Additionally, you also can use the Cloud migration assistant to help you going through the migration in a smooth way:

Jira Cloud Migration Assistant

About your second question:

Is there a forum where we can read "experience" from similar migrations at that scale?

The own Atlassian Community is the best forum to find previous experiences with Cloud migration and details from similar cases. To refine your search, I suggest searching for each problem you are facing using Google, configuring its filters to get the results from the last 6 months in the Community portal. E.g:

Please, let us know the problems you are facing so we can give you more specific instructions.