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!

[Manon Soubies-Camy _Modus Create_]

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!

[Sajit Nair]

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

[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.

[marc -Collabello--Phase Locked-]

@Manon Soubies-Camy : We have also looked into using SecNumCloud. Our current conclusion is that Atlassian data residency and SecNumCloud is problematic in terms of the expectation that storage and processing stays in SecNumCloud.

With Atlassian data residency, your data can be in transfer for up to 30 days outside of your data residency region. And If you use Forge addons, your data will be transferred to the US for processing by the Forge apps.
Also all Atlassian user data are stored in the "global region" (US), irrespective of your data residency location.

[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!

[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. 😅🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

[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.

[Adrian Smith]

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?

[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]

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]

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.

[Adrian Smith]

Well, I had hoped that @Dave Meyer would be more interactive. It appears Atlassian is still confused by the most basic ask in CLOUD-6999 (And hundreds of follow-ups).

[Dave Meyer]

@Adrian Smith with all due respect, we are delivering custom domains functionality this year and we stand by the approach we have taken for the initial release.

[Adrian Smith]

@Dave Meyer The vision of custom domains outlined so far does not resolve the request in CLOUD-6999. You are planning to release something, but it isn't the custom domains. It is a limited vanity domain name concept. Custom means "made or done to order for a particular customer." That would mean that the customer gets to select the URL assigned. Atlassian has not done provided a roadmap for custom domains.

This is a big issue for clients that would like to go to the cloud. Not only this specific issue, but the outright disrespect for cloud customers (or perspective customers) by not addressing this for 12 years and then attempting to change the requirements. I spoke at a Higher Education conference earlier this year and I wasn't surprised to find your Atlassian customers holding on to their servers because of responses like this relating to cloud. Atlassian dismisses customer requests and this highlights what customers give up by going cloud.

[Mark Benson]

@Adrian Smith I'd be inclined to agree that 12 years is an almost unbelievable amount of time to address probably one of the hottest if not the hottest asks in Atlassian Cloud's history.

It does not instill any confidence that customers are genuinely listened to or that solutions will be eventually be provided that align with the original ask. It really only seemed to gain any traction or prioritization when it was publicly ridiculed in some of the popular IT blogs for having been outstanding for so long.

You can stand by and implement a solution all you want but if you read the comments from some of the more tech savvy customers/Atlassian admins/third party app vendors (who actually use the products) the solution seems to have been pretty widely panned by the majority.

Some legitimate questions were asked in the comments for more transparency that still remain ignored/unanswered today - so is anyone actually listening?

[Jay Vlavianos]

@Dave Meyer agreed here that there seems to be a wide swing from the Atlassian team here on a very long standing ask.  Atlassian is delivering something against this ask finally, but its pretty clear that the voice of the customer here isn't being heard.  I understand your comment that you and Atlassian are confident in your solve here, but if you look at 6999 and associated pending release comments in the forum it is pretty clear that your customers don't think that is the case.

When comparing your ability to hear your customers needs and deliver specific functionality they need to run their business effectively, I am not seeing the same willingness to pivot to your customers asks as others in the industry (like ServiceNow, et al).

Can you help us understand how the detailed ask vs. implemented function is being reconciled internally in a way that you all feel like you are delivering successfully ?

[Dave Meyer]

We believe the approach we are taking offers the right balance of offering substantially more customization than the current state (which is obviously nothing) while still mitigating security risk and bringing something to customers. Atlassian's product leaders at every level are aware of the feedback.

If there was a way to offer a version of custom domains that addressed every requirement, without compromising security and without delaying delivery any further, obviously we would take it.

But in lieu of that, I think it would be a disservice to not ship a clear incremental improvement. There is nothing in our approach that moves us farther away from the level of customization that many customers are asking for. Rather, offering this initial solution is the most effective way for us to assess whether we can offer greater customization in the future.

[Adrian Smith]

@Dave Meyer Kudos for being the first from Atlassian to acknowledge that this is only an incremental improvement. That type of open dialog has been missing until this response.

[Mark Benson]

@Dave Meyer - I think one of the other issues you're facing in the comments is a lack of transparency.

Multiple customers have requested more information regarding the claims that this is a more secure method of implementing the feature, which is something that you have just touched on again.

Is there a particular reason Atlassian does not want to disclose more information on this topic? I think it would likely go a long way to placate some of those who are questioning the direction in the comments.

At the end of the day many of Atlassian's customers (at least the admins who run the products) are going to be IT professionals and have in depth experience across many IT fields. Vague explanations tend to not go down well, and neither does the feeling of being ignored.

[𝖂𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖆𝖒 Nichols]

@Dave Meyer12 years is forever in software timelines. Why is cloud a completely different product from server and lacking basic features like what @Adrian Smith described? Could you not offer cloud as server running on a VM that is auto updated by Atlassian?

[𝖂𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖆𝖒 Nichols]

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.

[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

[𝖂𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖆𝖒 Nichols]

"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?

[Chris K]

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

[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.

[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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

[𝖂𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖆𝖒 Nichols]

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.

[Ben Larson]

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 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

[𝖂𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖆𝖒 Nichols]

Again another feature that cloud simply lacks.

[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?

[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.

[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?

[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

[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 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

[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.

[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

[Joe Pursel]

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]

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