End of server sale & support – July 2021 update
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10 December 2021: Thanks for your interest in how work is progressing on Atlassian Cloud Migration. We've since shared an End of server sale & support – December 2021 update, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
Hi Community, I’m Partha, the Head of Cloud Migrations at Atlassian, responsible for ensuring our server customers needs are met in cloud. As a long-time Atlassian (~14 years), it has always been important to me that we listen and act on our customer’s feedback.
In order to focus on delivering a world-class cloud experience, we’re ending the sale and support of our server licenses. We understand the uncertainty created with a change like this and that it takes careful thought to evaluate your options and choose what’s right for you.
Feedback from customers like you has helped us shape and improve both our cloud and Data Center offerings and find better ways to support your journey to the cloud. So I wanted to take this opportunity to share an update on some common feedback we hear – and what we’re doing about it.
Security and data management
“Hello, when will Atlassian release the option to store data only on servers that are located in the EU (really only European Union, not Great Britain for example), or even better only in Germany, for Jira Cloud? If I am not mistaken, that is already possible for Jira Cloud Enterprise”
Security and data management are top priorities for you, so they remain a top priority for us. We’ve heard from health organizations working with patient data that have to comply with strict regulatory frameworks and military organizations that can’t store data on any device with connectivity.
We’re addressing security concerns related to regulatory data security compliance by accelerating our timelines for HIPAA, Financial Services Industry compliance (such as Bafin or APRA) and FedRAMP moderate compliance and we’ve added BYOK encryption for Jira. Visit our cloud roadmap for the latest updates.
For our European customers who face some of the most stringent regulatory, privacy, and security requirement, we also launched a Privacy, security and GDPR webinar, available to watch on-demand, to address the fundamentals of how we handle user data, our response to the recent Schrems II ruling, and how features like data residency and BYOK encryption (coming soon) can help you meet regulatory requirements.
Some customers had questions around data security and control over data on cloud in comparison to on-premise, so we developed the Atlassian Trust Center to connect you to the latest information on the security, reliability, privacy, and compliance of our products and services.
Lastly, we know that having control over where your data is hosted is a requirement for customers of all sizes to adopt cloud – not just enterprises. We’ve heard your feedback that data residency is a blocker when it comes to selling and positioning our cloud plans, and that it’s a hard requirement for your customers to move to cloud. To help meet your customers' compliance requirements and better support you in driving cloud business, we announced that, in addition to the Enterprise plan, data residency is now included in Standard and Premium cloud plans for new customers.
Join our Trust & security group to share additional feedback and work with our Security and Compliance team.
The process of migrating
“My company currently has a self serviced Atlassian Server, but we are looking at migrating that Server to a Cloud based Atlassian service. We had previously reached out about this with your company but it was difficult timing for us to follow up with at that time. When we reached out, we were informed that Atlassian provides free migration services that we are interested in using as well.”
Some of you told us you wanted clearer guidance on migration options, ways to compare cloud and data center, and more information on the associated migration effort and costs. So we built out our Cloud Migration Center to help you prepare strategically, technically, and financially and launched regular bi-weekly Cloud Migration Demos with the migrations team for a step-by-step demo on how to migrate to cloud, complete with live chat Q&A.
We also wanted to ensure that customers were getting the advice they needed to make the right decision for their team and navigate any complexities that might come with migration. We now offer the ability for commercial and Academic customers with more than 25 users/agents to schedule a migration consultation with our Loyalty Advocates to discuss cloud features, pricing, differences between self-managed and cloud, migration strategy, and more.
Apps and integrations
“The Apps required to make the system compliant are either not available or "dumbed down" versions of what is available on Server. This seems to be a problem in the restrictions that Cloud has in terms of what the App developers can do.”
Customers of all license sizes told us they rely on a mix of marketplace and in-house developed apps to extend the value they get from their Atlassian products. In some cases, they were disappointed by a lack of equivalent options on cloud or data center or were concerned that significant additional effort might be required to ensure they work as required post-migration.
We’ve been working hard to expand our cloud APIs, and since the beginning of this year, we’ve added over 450 new cloud apps to the Atlassian Marketplace. Currently, 78 of the 100 most popular server apps are available on the cloud and 7 have their functionality included in cloud editions of their associated base products. For example, Portfolio for Jira is available natively in cloud as Advanced Roadmaps.
Our teams are not only focussed on ensuring apps are available in cloud, but are working closely with app developers to enable them with the APIs to close any feature gaps or create whole new features in their cloud versions of their apps. Bringing more apps to cloud and closing any feature gaps remains a focus area for Atlassian and is an area we continue to increase our investment in.
We are also supporting the migration of custom apps and development of cloud new apps with our new developer platform, Forge, which is now Generally Available and in production. There are several custom apps that have already been built.
Stay across our progress with the New cloud apps round-ups.
We’re also committed to making it as easy as possible to migrate app data with automated migration paths through the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant via an Early Access Program.
Review our list of apps with a cloud migration path of apps with a cloud migration path or contact your app vendor to understand what their current process is.
Scale and performance
“The stability and security is substantially better than we achieved on premise. Being able to scale with individual user licenses is very cost-effective.”
We recognize that cloud has the potential to unlock global scale for your organization and announced the general availability of up to 20,000 users on a single instance for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud.
To offer maximum licensing flexibility, we're releasing new price tiers between 10,000 - 20,000 users for Jira Software and Confluence across our Standard, Premium and Enterprise (annual only) plans.
With the launch of Cloud Enterprise, our highest offering for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud, enterprise customers can now take advantage of multiple instances (up to 20,000 users each) to support autonomy, security or customization needs. Read How many instances of a product does my organization need? to learn more about whether you could benefit from a multi-instance environment.
We’ll continue to invest in scaling our cloud products to meet the needs of some of our largest enterprise customers by raising the per-instance user limit to 35,000 in 2022.
We understand how important it is to deliver world-class performance for our cloud customers and have committed to provide regular updates on performance improvements we’ve made. In the past 6 months, load times for these common actions for Jira and Confluence cloud have all improved:
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Opening a Jira Backlog – 1.4x faster
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Opening a Jira Board – 1.2x faster
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Creating a Jira Issue – 1.3x faster
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Initial Confluence page load – 1.9x faster
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Edit button loading on a Confluence page – 4.0x faster
While we’ve made good progress, we know there’s still room for improvement, and our teams are working hard to deliver the best experience possible. There’s more detail in New year, better performance in cloud and Cloud performance update and you can track our progress on the cloud roadmap.
Pricing and packaging
“Hello, we have currently Jira Server and Confluence license for 50 users and we're considering migration to cloud. Do you have any discount for existing on-premise customers?”
Many of you told us you were finding it hard to confidently calculate and compare what your new costs would be after migrating. This was further complicated by a complex mix of products and integrations and how discounts and credits might apply. So we’ve made it easier to calculate your costs in cloud and server and to determine what cloud could save you in hidden costs.
Our goal is to make sure your cloud migration goes as smoothly as possible, without worrying about double-paying for licenses or rushing through testing, so we’re helping server and Data Center customers explore and evaluate cloud at their own pace for up to 12 months with free cloud migration trials and offering a cloud loyalty discount or dual-licensing for larger customers, which allows you to run your self-managed and cloud products in parallel during your move to cloud.
We also introduced loyalty discounts for Data Center and Data Center Community subscriptions for those of you who work for charitable non-profit organizations that require community discounts for our Data Center products.
Admin control
“We are a pharmaceutical company with 300 employees. Because of international regulatory requirements it is not easy for us to migrate to cloud services. The main reason is that we need to test every system (system validation) after each upgrade. Is there any solution for small pharmaceutical companies who wants to use Confluence and JIRA?”
Many admins told us they need more control to preview, test, and prepare end-users; so we’re continuing to invest in capabilities to meet these needs. Sandboxes are a direct replacement for developer license keys in server and data center, which allows you to test any changes or new feature rollouts before they get to production and ensure everything works the way it should. We also have Release Tracks, so you can opt-in to updates from Atlassian in a fixed two-week window for additional predictability into which changes are coming to your instance and when.
We'll continue to iterate on these to provide you with the control you need to be comfortable administering your cloud environment.
We also added the ability to use a company-branded URL for a Jira or Confluence cloud site to our roadmap for 2022. We’ll continue to share details as they become available. Until then, watch our cloud roadmap for updates.
Lastly, we’re continuing to explore options to make your user management transition from self-managed to Cloud easier.
As you can see there’s plenty of work underway to listen and act on our customer’s feedback and ensure we’re delivering a world-class cloud experience. We'll continue sharing the work being done through quarterly updates (like this one) in Community and on our cloud roadmap.
- Partha
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