Atlassian's Server License Discontinuation: What are your options?

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By now, everyone is aware of the Atlassian’s announcement to discontinue selling new Server instances from Feb 2, 2021. If you have been living under a rock and missed the announcement, you can check it out here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-cloud

So what are your options? Moving to cloud or upgrading to data center? There are a lot of factors to consider before making a decision. These factors include license tier, availability of features such as SSO and 2FA, your storage requirements, security compliance requirements, etc.  I hope this article will help you with that. I’m going license tier wise to make it easier for you to follow.

10 - 50 Users:

With this tier, you will find it easier to just migrate to Cloud as upgrading to DC will prove to be a big financial overhead. The basic data security has been taken care of by Atlassian and unless you have stringent security compliance needs, moving to Cloud will be a perfect solution for you. There is a free license available as well, although with very limited features.

If you do have security compliance needs, you can check Atlassian cloud’s security and compliance details here: https://www.atlassian.com/trust. If the compliance you’re looking for is not listed, you should stick to Server for now and raise a request with Atlassian support to know whether it’s in their pipeline and make a decision accordingly.

Our Recommendation: Atlassian Cloud

100 Users:

If your users fall into this category and you foresee a rise in their numbers and have strict compliance criteria, there is no better alternative than Data Center. However, if you do not need compliances, you might want to consider shifting to the cloud as it would be a cheaper option.

Our Recommendation: Atlassian Data Center

250 Users and more:

The Data Center will be the best choice for the tier with more users. As the number of users in the cloud increases, it will become expensive. You could also be using a lot of marketplace applications, which are more likely to be available on DC rather than cloud, so keep that in mind.

Our Recommendation: Atlassian Data Center

Our suggestion is based on what we believe is best for you, but you are free to think outside the box. Here are a few points to think about when deciding between Cloud and Data Center:

1. What is the user-tier for you? Will it be the same after 1-2 years?
2. Do you want security certifications?
3. What do you have in your budget?
4. Compatibility of Marketplace Apps
5. Storage Requirements
6. Load on applications (using multiple machines to balance the load)

I hope that this article has helped you recognize the different factors to be considered while migrating and has assisted you in making rational choices. 

As a customer-centric Atlassian SSO vendor, we are committed in helping our server customers to migrate to Data Center. We will be providing full support and maintenance for all our Server add-ons till 2024.

It’s hard to leave until you have to leave. Wishing you a smooth and easy migration.

In case of any queries, please feel free to drop us a mail at info@xecurify.com

[Jimmy Seddon]

This is a very good set of recommendations.  Thank you for posting @Ankit!

[Kat Warner]

@Ankit - Can you provide more details about why your recommendation for data center from 250+ users?

Atlassian's cloud roadmap shows current support for 10,000 users with plans for support of up to 35,000 users. Their existing product already has (some) security certifications, many marketplace apps, unlimited storage on some plans, and utilises infrastructure to balance the load.

[Elizabeth Howden]

@Ankit Thanks for sharing your perspective! I wanted to also share a few additional resources for anyone interested in this topic: 

• We created this quiz to help customers evaluate whether cloud or Data Center is a better fit 
• We also discussed making a decision on the best path forward in our webinar, Navigating the server end of sale and support. You can watch that webinar on-demand here.