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CLOSED AMA with Dave Meyer: Head of Product, Enterprise Trust

Dave Meyer

Hi Community -

Welcome back for another Migrations Month! This May, we’re sharing helpful resources for those who want to learn more about migrating from server to Atlassian Cloud. Tune in all month and join the conversation for a chance to win travel themed giveaways when you participate! I’m excited to host this Ask Me Anything (AMA) event to hear directly from you, our community members.

I’m Dave Meyer, Head of Product for Enterprise Cloud, and I’m especially interested to hear:

What questions do you have about security, privacy, administration, and compliance in Atlassian Cloud?
Are there any questions I can answer with regard to your organization’s Atlassian Cloud migration?
Are there any other general trust topics you’d like to discuss?

Cloud and security can be complex, and this space is constantly changing. We are here to help and give guidance wherever possible!

Here's how it works:

Add your questions below any time before or during the AMA deadline on Friday, May 19th. Also, be sure to take a look at other community members' questions and up-vote those that you find interesting.

Be sure to join us on Wednesday, May 31st as we wrap up Migrations Month by answering your questions. Watch the page and be ready to add follow-up questions and discuss further with other community members!

Cheers,

Dave

P.S. I know I mentioned giveaways at the beginning of the post. We’ll be giving away travel-themed Atlassian swag each week in May, and if you ask a question in the AMA, you’ll be entered to win an Atlassian branded travel pillow and eye mask set!

Just a little something to make your journey to cloud or your next real life vacation more comfortable!

Comments

Jimmy Seddon

Hey @Dave Meyer!

It was great to see you again at Team '23!

In the vein of "general administration & security", our company discovered a couple of free cloud sites that had been created by users who had their requests for products rejected due to security concerns.

I know that https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1468 will cover this use case by allowing org admins more control over managed user accounts, but the current update says: "We plan to deliver this functionality to you over the course of FY23 and will use this ticket to provide updates."

I was wondering if it was possible for you to provide any more detail on the timeline of when the first bits of functionality will start being rolled out, and anything else you can share on the timeframe for this to be completely delivered.

Thanks!

Girish Shenoy

Hi @Dave Meyer

How can we know what features are changing in JCMA. e.g. limiting of issue migration batch to 1000. Recently we faced this challenge while migration and no one knew what was happening unless it was escalated outside the CMM. We were later told that no 13th April someone set the migration limit for the issue batch which cause our migration to fail. I wanted to avoid such issues going forward. How could you enable us so we know what policies or features changed internally?

Nena Kruljac

Hi Dave,

no article here: Article not found - Atlassian Community.

BR, Nena

Missy McCabe

Whoops - the Migrations Month post should be live now

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Migration-Program/Migrations-Month-is-back/ba-p/2330465

Manon Soubies-Camy

Hi @Dave Meyer,

Atlassian announced last year at High Velocity ITSM that data residency support for France was on the roadmap, but it's not on the official Cloud roadmap. When can we expect data residency in France?

Thank you!

Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_

Hello @Dave Meyer !

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!

We're a very large enterprise organization (75,000+ employees), who has multiple on-prem and some cloud instances for Confluence. We're pretty onboard with migrating more teams to Confluence cloud, but the ability to share content with the entire Org, without paying for multiple licenses, on multiple instances, for read-only access to the content on multiple cloud instances, is holding us back. We're remaining with on-prem or moving to using Sharepoint to handle Org wide content, since we can't use Confluence Cloud to open that information, without making it world-shareable. Is there a solution for this, that we have overlooked, or are you thinking about a solution for this?

Ben Larson_hwo0bn

Hello @Dave Meyer

As I'm sure you are aware government agencies are still very wary of cloud. Is gov data segregated? Are they any other safeguards in place to help alleviate concerns?

Ben

Dave LIAO

Added my vote to this! This has been - and continues to be - a pain point everywhere I serve as an Atlassian admin.

...also realized I voted up ACCESS-1468 many moons ago. 😅🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

Chris K_4mhp8d

Hi @Dave Meyer

What a great format and great opportunity for community questions!

In my company, we are currently considering switching from Data Center to Cloud.

What would be your top three arguments you would recommend a company, like ours (~1000 Jira/ Confluence Users) switching to cloud?

Which value provides it for the admins and the users in comparison to Data Center?

What are common concerns, and how do you address or resolve them?

Thank you for your time and take care!

Greetings from Germany

Chris

William Nichols_hpqdi2

Howdy @Dave Meyer ,

As an IT SysAdmin I've always wondered this question:

Why is the functionality of cloud so limited??

Compared to datacenter/server cloud is simply an inferior product and I would NEVER recommend it to clients. This is coming from a HUGE Atlassian advocate in many orgs. The combination of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket is excellent. I own shares of TEAM. However even with all these strengths cloud does not allow admins the control they need.

One other point I would make is that getting support for cloud products is almost impossible. I have filed out the sales form at many orgs and at none of them have we ever heard back from an Account Exec or Rep. Just my thoughts.

John Dunkelberg

Similar question to Christian. I just completed a report-out internally with the conclusion that while Cloud has closed most of the gaps to Datacenter, there's not a compelling story for why we'd want to invest in doing an expensive and disruptive migration to get to a higher-cost solution on the Cloud.

Adrian Smith_19rif4

Why hasn't cloud-6999 been prioritized? https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/03/atlassian_cloud_6999_negative_feedback/

The most recent update does not inspire organizations to trust Atlassian. How can Atlassian encourage migrations when something as straightforward as cloud-6999 is being ignored and driven in the wrong direction?

Sajit Nair

@Dave Meyer - same question.. but for India.

Sajit Nair

Hello @Dave Meyer ,
I missed meeting you at Team23.. but I hope you've been well.
Anyhow.. I am excited to know most of questions above..

Also, we are still waiting to see India on DR roadmap.
Any idea when that will be happening?

+ I have a very simple suggestion/request..
With all these tough migration cookies you and your teams have been cracking.. It would be great if Atlassian published more white papers on the challenges and success stories which will give confidence to others who are contemplating the same.

John Dunkelberg

Agreed on the whitepapers. In our recent DC/Cloud gap analysis we asked Atlassian what whitepapers they could offer as to the advantages of Cloud over DC for current DC customers. Their being unable to supply such seemed a pretty strong datapoint that there was not a persuasive advantage at this time.

Dave Meyer

Hi @Manon Soubies-Camy

We don’t currently have plans to offer a dedicated data residency region in France. There was an internal miscommunication that resulted in France being listed as a planned country during the ITSM event, I apologize for that. Speaking with a number of our French customers, we know that SecNumCloud compliance is a key need and I anticipate that will be our immediate focus for the French market. We are working on building a timeline so that we can add that to our roadmap, but we believe our existing offerings of data residency in the EU broadly or Germany specifically will meet the needs of most customers.

Regards,

Dave

Dave Meyer

@Sajit Nair India is in our plans. We’ve kicked off work for data residency support in India. It will be added to the roadmap officinally towards the end of June, and the expected ship date is towards the end of Q1 2024.

Dave Meyer

Hey @Jimmy Seddon it was great to see you as well! Thanks also to @Dave LIAO for the question.

We know that ensuring admins are in control of their environment is important for security and cost-management.

This is on our public roadmap as “Product requests” as we will offer a combined way to block new product creation by default and also get informed when users request to create new instances. We are on track to ship before the end of this year, and we’ll share an update on the jira.atlassian.com ticket too.

Dave Meyer

Hi William,

Thank you for your question. I hear your concerns and am happy to hear you are an Atlassian advocate at your organization.

Can I ask what admin controls you are referring to? Over the past few years, we’ve made massive strides in our enterprise cloud offerings, inclusive of investments in comprehensive data protection, centralized admin control, and resilience at scale. You can find these on our Cloud Roadmap.

For admins, we also know many enjoy the benefits of cloud, as they no longer are required to run routine maintenance or upgrades, freeing up their time to focus on more strategic tasks.

While I’m certainly realistic that there are certain capabilities that are simply not possible in a SaaS environment, I’m confident that we have a rich and ever more powerful administrator experience and comprehensive end-user functionality in our cloud products.

Atlassian retains a relatively limited number of account reps compared to many other companies. That’s why all our products are available to quote, price, and purchase directly through our website. However, we do try to ensure that any inbound requests are answered with an acceptable resolution.

Regards,

Dave

Dave Meyer

Hi @Chris K and @John Dunkelberg,

Thanks for your questions!

Ultimately, our cloud products enable us to bring improvements and bug fixes to you faster, and ship powerful new features that are only possible in a SaaS environment. I think the keynote highlights from our Team 23 event offer a great taste of what this looks like. Since our products are built on a shared platform, we can build consistent experiences that drive better connection between teams, information, and workflows.

If I had to sum up some key benefits for admins, leaders, and users, I’d say the top three benefits are:

Admins get platform-level administration that gives them centralized visibility and control with a single control center. Centralized administration means admins can configure, manage, and optimize their Atlassian footprint from a single location. Moving to cloud also means admins can ensure that data is secure, private, compliant, and available - so they can focus on running the business, instead.
Second, leaders get the visibility needed to align work to outcomes and connect data to decision-making. The common technology framework of Jira provides shared context across all teams, so that they can work in the way that makes sense to them, without sacrificing alignment. Advanced Roadmaps in Jira provide end to end visibility while Atlassian Analytics and insights in Jira Software enable insight-driven decision making, leveraging powerful data visualization. Ultimately, the result is a better understanding of what and how work gets done - which teams can use to improve and deliver more value to their customers.
And finally, who doesn’t want happy users? Cloud users get an overall better product experience with cloud-only features that can make them more productive and efficient. Because of the tight integration among tools, we can help cloud teams do better work, more quickly - through features like native automation in Jira and Confluence, Atlassian Intelligence, hundreds of templates, and cross-product linking and search powered by machine learning.

If you want to learn more about how our cloud and Data Center offerings compare, check out the comparisons for Confluence and Jira Software that we’ve built. Our number one company priority is to create a path to cloud, and demonstrate the ROI on cloud, for every team as quickly as possible. You can check out the features we’ve shipped - and those we’re still working on - on our Cloud Roadmap.

Dave Meyer

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your question. Government data is not currently segregated, but we are working towards achieving FedRAMP Moderate ATO and will be able to share timing for the launch of that attestation in September. Our FedRAMP environment will be completely segregated from our commercial offering.

In the meantime, we encourage you to move to Data Center, which is purpose-built to support our public sector customers. We’ve recently announced a number of new improvements across our product experiences, performance, as well as security. If you’d like to learn more about these investments, please watch our latest webinar.

Regards,

Dave

Dave Meyer

Hi @Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_ ,

We have 3 solutions that could work for you depending on the type of information and the amount of people with whom you need to share access: Anonymous Access, Single-space Guests, and Public links. Anonymous Access and Guests are available now and Public Links will be available in Q4 2023

The most common way to do this is with IP Allowlisting in conjunction with Anonymous Access. This is more or less what customers do on-prem – anonymous access allows you to open up the entire site or individual pages to users without authentication or a license. IP allowlisting allows you to restrict access to your site to specific IP addresses, which is similar to having your on-prem site on an internal network. But since this does require uses to be on a specific network or VPN, we know it doesn’t work for all customers in all cases.

Single-space Guests are now available in beta, with additional security functionality coming to GA in Q3 2023. Sites can have 5 free guests for each paid seat, so a site with 1000 users can have up to 5000 free guests. Keep in mind the cloud site limit still applies, which as of today, is 50,000 total seats across guests and paid users for any one site. Each guest can only access one space at a time. But you can have guests in as many spaces as you’d like. And, there are no limits (beyond the site limit) to the number of guests you can have in a specific space. Within their assigned space, guests can be managed like any other user so you can change their permissions to view only if needed.

Public Links will allow you to create a view-only version of a Confluence page with a unique Public Link URL. Since this would need to be managed per-page, this could create additional overhead if you need to share out a large amount of individual pages.

Dave Meyer

Hi Girish,

I absolutely understand the frustration. I’ve reported the impact to our migration assistant team. We will work on improving our internal processes so that changes like this are communicated in release notes or other channels. I acknowledge that this has been a recurring issue and we need to get on top of it.

Regards,

Dave

Dave Meyer

Hi again guys 😊

The Cloud and Data Center comparison on our website - as well as the double click on how the platforms compare for DevOps in particular - do a good job of laying out how our Cloud products enable connection, productivity, and business value that is just not possible behind the firewall.

In terms of direct customer stories of folks who have migrated to cloud from Data Center, here are a few stories that I’d recommend. Our team is developing more on a continuous basis.

How GoDaddy adopted new ways of working in the Atlassian cloud: GoDaddy migrated 13,000 users from Data Center to Cloud and shared how that journey enabled them to optimize a complex Atlassian environment and deliver tangible value to the business that simply wasn’t possible on Data Center.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Engineering transformation at scale for 25,000 Jira users: This session dives into how Australia’s largest bank with a user base of 25K users migrated their Data Center instance of Jira to Atlassian’s Cloud. Learn how The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) was able to comply with the industry’s regulatory and security requirements and successfully migrate to cloud.
“OneJira,” one mission: How Edenred is centralizing globally onto Jira Service Management Cloud: Edenred started migrating on-premise tools to Atlassian Data Center in 2018, which alleviated some of their maintenance responsibilities. However, the team was still spending more time than they wanted managing infrastructure instead of their own products. In 2020, Edenred launched an initiative to centralize their sprawling Atlassian toolset onto one cloud instance, which also unlocked new enhancements like enterprise-grade security.

Answered your question about India data residency about @Sajit Nair .

Thanks,

Dave

Dave Meyer

Hi Adrian,

I’m confused by your question. The article you linked to is referring to customer feedback specifically on announcements from us regarding that we are shipping custom domain support in the coming months. We’ve worked hard over the past 18 months to deliver a solution that meets the security and customization needs of our customers, and it’s shipping soon. So it’s certainly been prioritized.

I remain confident in our decision-making and approach to delivering custom domains. It will be a major step forward for our Jira Service Management customers and offer a level of customization for Jira Software and Confluence that is unmatched among our SaaS competitors.

Thanks, Dave

Adrian Smith_19rif4

The request has been around for almost twelve years. I would consider this to be a lack of prioritization.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

In the latest update Atlassian has indicated that they are not going to support what customers requested.

"The scope of "custom domains" on this ticket is to allow customers to use Atlassian cloud products on their own second-level domain, i.e. jira.acme.com or acme.com/confluence"

Adrian Smith_19rif4

The latest public update confirmed that the actual solution is being ignored.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Enterprise-articles/Custom-Domains-in-Cloud-Our-Approach/ba-p/2360684

whatever.myorg.com is the request. This shouldn't forward to something else. It should be the base URL for the product. Atlassian has not listened to customer feedback about what is keeping them form moving to the cloud.

Do you honestly believe that Atlassian's "decision-making and approach" resolves 6999 for customers? 99% of comments say otherwise.

Joe Pursel_943fmb

Hi Dave,

I am planning the migration of Jira and Confluence from our parent company. These instances are server-hosted on-prem and contain current and historical production projects and content that must be migrated out of the parent company's servers.

Our Cloud instances are in production, and many users have accounts in both the server-hosted instances and our Cloud instances. We will be migrating Jira Projects and Confluence Spaces/pages to the cloud.

My question is - When users are migrated from the server to the Cloud version, how does the Cloud Migration Software change the user IDs in the server to their email addresses in the Cloud? Will I have to provide a reference table for the migration?

We do not use Atlassian Access, but we use the Default Authentication Policy, which is connected to our Azure AD.

Thank you for hosting this AMA.

Joe

Dave Meyer

Hey @Joe Pursel ,

We use email addresses as the primary identifier in the cloud products, so when you move data (with associated user accounts) to cloud, we look at the email address on the account from server:

If there's no Atlassian account (in cloud) with that email address, we create one
If there is, we associate any references to that user from the server data to that cloud account.

So the primary thing is to make sure that each user in server has an email address, and that it matches the one they are using or will end up using with their cloud account. That's why it's the first thing listed here https://support.atlassian.com/migration/docs/clean-up-your-server-instance-before-migration/

Our migration tools do some integrity checks to help check the validity of the data as well.

Dave

Joe Pursel_943fmb

Thanks, Dave,

We are working with an Atlassian Migration Team that will contact our Parent company's Atlassian Team to perform the list of items to prepare for migration.

Joe

John Dunkelberg

Thanks @Dave Meyer - I'd gone over the GoDaddy one before and found it interesting.

Thanks for the comparison page, I'll make sure to link that from our internal resources for our future discussions.

I guess I'm not seeing a lot to back up the "Better collaboration and innovation from the latest features and functionality" bullet point currently. As an org making a migration decision rather than a first implementation decision that's a big one. I'm sure that will change as Atlassian continues to invest heavily in Cloud functionality.

William Nichols_hpqdi2

Don't do it Chris! Stay with Data Center. Cloud removes any control Admins previously had, such as the ability to interact with the tables (i.e. mass delete users or groups) Cloud is an inferior product in nearly every way.

William Nichols_hpqdi2

Again another feature that cloud simply lacks.

William Nichols_hpqdi2

"While I’m certainly realistic that there are certain capabilities that are simply not possible in a SaaS environment, I’m confident that we have a rich and ever more powerful administrator experience and comprehensive end-user functionality in our cloud products."

Thanks for your response. I have read through the entire AMA. This quote and all your responses to customers with needs, demonstrates to me a dichotomy between what you believe our needs are and what they are. Perhaps if you had enough account reps they could inform you of our needs.
Surely a basic feature such as mass user deletion via interaction with the SQL tables can be included no?

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