Cloud migration resources roundup: August 2021

[#1]

Happy August, everyone! It's wild to think 2021 is more than halfway over, but what better way to finish the year strong than to getting your business onto Atlassian Cloud! We're back this month with a brand new set of cloud migration resources, so take a look and leave us a comment below for anything you'd like us to create and share in future roundups. Oh, and don't forget to take a look at all the great things that came out in last month's roundup.

This month has included a whirlwind of webinars designed to help you wherever you are in your migration journey! Learn from Forrester consultant Reggie Lau on the ROI and costs of migrating to Atlassian Cloud, or Splunk Atlassian admin Greg Warner on what he wish he’d known before starting his migration to make it easier. Plus many others!

Happy migrating!

Jacob

Here’s what’s new:

• Moving Splunk's 10,000 users to Cloud: on-demand webinar on why Splunk challenged the status quo in order to unlock the value of cloud, and what teams can do to prepare for a successful migration.
• Northwestern Mutual's journey from Data Center to Cloud: on-demand webinar on how to navigate a complex environment and migrate more than 5,000 users from Data Center to Cloud. 
• de Volksbank's move to Atlassian Cloud: on-demand webinar that walks through all aspects of migrating in a highly regulated environment.
• The financial impact of migrating to Atlassian Cloud: on-demand webinar that breaks down the ROI and costs of migrating to Atlassian Cloud, featuring Forrester consultant, Reggie Lau.

• "What your industry says about your cloud migration": blog post outlining the top reasons why companies in specific industries are migrating to Atlassian Cloud, and what benefits they see after.

And don’t forget about the tried and true!

• Cloud Migration Center - central hub for all things Atlassian Migration Program. Includes links to our full resources page, server to Cloud migration guide, migration contact form, and more!
• Server to Cloud migration guide - phase by phase info on how to migrate, with links out to more detailed documentation.
• Cloud Migrations demo - a step by step walkthrough of cloud migrations, complete with a deep dive on choosing your migration strategy and a demo of the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant. You can watch the demo on-demand or register for a session with live Q&A. 
• Cloud Migration Demo Q&A (Pre-migration) - part one of all answers to the top pre-migration preparation questions we hear in the Cloud Migrations demo sessions.
• Cloud Migration Demo Q&A (During the migration) - part two of all answers to the top mid-migration questions we hear in the Cloud Migrations demo sessions.
• Cloud migration trial - a great first step if you want to explore Cloud or test your migration without double paying. And here’s a demo on how to claim and use it.
• Intro to Migrations eBook - recommended reading for anyone starting a migration!
• Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant - free apps that help you migrate users, spaces, and projects. (Here’s a demo on how to use app assessment within the Cloud migration assistants)
• Cloud Business Case toolkit - a bundle of assets to help you communicate the value of Atlassian Cloud and convince your organization to migrate.
• Admin Migration toolkit - a runbook template, migrations steps checklist, and communication templates to get your migration started and make it run easier.
• Forrester TEI (Total Economic Impact) report - a study that examines the potential ROI customers may realize by migrating to Atlassian Cloud.

[Bernhard Breit]

Sorry for being rude, but I want to make a point here: Get lost with all your "migrate to the cloud" stuff and produce a solution for people who do NOT want their data to be on somebody else´s hardware god knows where but want to keep their own servers - people like me who use Atlassian products in a small way and cannot afford to fork 4 figures each year for a datacenter license.

´nuff said.

Angry B.

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @Bernhard Breit ,

Shortly you'll be able to choose the "where" somebody else's hardware is located - we're enabling data residency options for all paid plans starting soon. Right now our EU options are located in Ireland and Frankfurt, Germany. We're adding more regions as well - Canada, Japan, Australia, and the UK are all currently on the roadmap. The Cloud Standard tier per-user is $7 USD monthly for Jira Software, and $5 USD monthly for Confluence.

Before joining Atlassian full-time, I was a sysadmin at a non-profit institution. I definitely understand needing to do a lot on a small budget. If your organization is a non-profit, you can request a free self-managed Data Center license (there's also discounted Cloud ... just FYI as I know that's not what you're after). In addition to my day job, I also did volunteer work for many years at places that couldn't afford IT staff. I maintained self-hosted server applications for those organizations, donated the hardware out of my own pocket, in some cases literally running it out of my own basement. I was always grateful for software that I could run self-managed, as that meant these nonprofits with no budget could make use of them.

But as the years went on and my life circumstances changed, I realized I'd been seriously undervaluing my time. Recovering from one hard drive crash was particularly frustrating, as although I had backups, I spent the better part of 3 consecutive nights trying to get the RAID working again short of one drive that I couldn't afford to replace. Eventually I just replaced that entire server and rebuilt the applications from backup, but that was a week that I'd prefer not to repeat. Fast-forward to now, and that particular nonprofit is using two SaaS-based applications instead of the hardware I was maintaining. I donate dollars instead of hours now, and at least for me, I feel a lot more at ease with the situation. They're not going to call me at 9:30pm on a school night for an outage.

I realize this doesn't fit the bill for everyone. There are some truly kick-ass systems administrators out there who can run a java-based server application blindfolded. And if that's you, the good news is that the Server license you have is perpetual. You can still renew it through February 2024 if it's still current and get updates. After February 2022, the Server updates will be limited to security fixes, and after February 2024 there won't be any updates at all - but your license will continue working forever. You can keep using that server until the drives fail and probably unlike me, you'll easily be able to recover in a snap and keep going. 

Cheers,
Daniel

[Jack Brickey]

@Jacob Wisner ,

this is a great list of articles and appreciate you sharing here. While I’m already on the cloud I’m certainly very interested in what others are going through as they begin their migration. I’m sure it can be a daunting exercise for many companies so it is great that Atlassian is taking the time to help those companies be successful.

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Jacob Wisner thank you for sharing all these valuable information!

Most of our clients are on server, and I'm pretty sure these will come in handy!

[Bernhard Breit]

Hello @Daniel Eads

thanks for the long reply, but to keep it short, as you said it, it doesn´t fit the bill here.

I am opposed to ANY cloud location, so all the stuff about "data residency" infuriates me just some more, as my claim is that my data shall reside nowhere else than in my basement.

Further, I am not working for any non-profit organisation, so trying to get a non-profit licence will not work - I run my servers in my basement just for me and myself, just for fun and my education.

And then, thanks for confirming it, I understand that my current license will continue to work. But, to keep up with changes and to broaden my knowledge, I have the habit of now and then reinstalling my servers onto a new hardware or just testing a new flavour of Linux or BSD or other open OS. Maybe I just have not found the right way to do this - and no, I definitely am no "kick-ass" admin - but whenever I want to set up confluence on a new host, I need to revalidate my license - and THAT will no longer work after February 2024, right?

So, while the end is still a long way off, it is coming and I need to prepare, because as I am sure you understand, I do have a challenging day job which leaves me precious little time for my homegrown datacenter in the basement, and changing my central documentation system will have a huge impact on everything.

All that remains is the hope that one day all those abominable clouds will be infected with some truly evil malware, nobody will be able to access their data anymore and people will come to belatedly realize that it simply is NOT a good idea to go ahead and blindly trust in others to do their data protection and information security for them.

Best regards,

Bernhard

[Daniel Eads]

My teammate has been answering this question about the Server ID validation regularly, as it can be a bit misleading! His full answer is at this link, but the short of it is that the Server ID only needs to be entered on license renewal. When you move hardware in the future, you can retrieve the existing license (which won't change after the Server end-of-support) from my.atlassian.com and enter it into Confluence, without having to regenerate a new key.

[Bernhard Breit]

@Daniel Eadsthanks for that information, I will look at the link and give it a try. Nevertheless I guess sooner or later I will need to find a new documentation tool or wiki for my private use because I expect when a tool is no longer maintained the interoperability will degrade over time.

Still dont see why Atlassian cannot make a "community edition" or something of Confluence which is not officially supported but gets new functionality handed down from datacenter version and doesnt need to be licensed for max. 10 users. Do they really think it would have noticeable impact on their earnings?

I´d rather see the advantages of such an approach, because I would expect if there is such a community version, people would start to play around with it and later would hop onto the commercial lane. But of course, they expect their cloud offerings to do exactly that, and for most people, that will be the case. *sigh*