Against the Grain: Why Migrate Back from Jira Cloud to Data Center?

Gregory Kneller

This kind of reverse migration is rarely discussed.

While Atlassian actively promotes moving to cloud solutions, and many companies follow this trend, for some organizations, a migration in the opposite direction may be a better fit.

In my view, the main reasons for moving from Jira Cloud to Jira Data Center could include:

1. Consolidation, mergers, and acquisitions: When several teams come together, with different groups and projects managed in separate Jira Cloud instances, it may be simpler to organize centralized management in Data Center.
2. Data control and confidentiality: For some organizations working with sensitive information or adhering to strict security requirements, the full control over data offered by an on-premises or private cloud solution is essential.
3. Customization and flexibility: Jira Data Center provides more options for integrations and customization that are not always available in the cloud version.

What about your experience? Do you plan to migrate from Cloud to Data Center? And if so, what are your reasons?

Thomas Rieder

We often hear these reasons for Data Center over Cloud:

1. Customization - custom apps for Data Center offer way more options than the limited APIs available in cloud (as an example, you cannot include custom Javascript or CSS in cloud sites, while this is possible on-premise)
2. Pricing - with the introduction of consumption-based pricing cloud is simply not financially viable for some enterprises. We have customers that produce machines (i.e. the ones used in mechanical engineering)  and want to track them in Jira Assets -- they have hundreds of thousands of machines, driving up the cost.
3. Rate limitations - In the cloud Automations have limits opposed onto them, the REST API has rate limits and there are limits to the total number of comments or worklogs of an issue. These are simply not present on-premise and any shortcoming in performance can (usually) be fixed by scaling up the cluster.

I still think that for the majority of customers cloud is the better offer from a feature-perspective but reasons #2 and #3 (which were not there three years ago, by the way), make it a though sell, so I understand the reasoning behind moving back to Data Center.

@Gregory Kneller We do not encounter reasons #1 and #2 much anymore. Atlassian has most certifications required by all but the most paranoid of companies and the migration tooling (JCMA and CCMA) got really good.