End of server sale & support - July 2023 update
Hello Community,
My name is Sarah Joshi and I recently transitioned as the Head of Cloud Shift at Atlassian. You might have met me at Team '23, either on the floor or during one of my Cloud Adoption breakout sessions!
Since we announced the end of server sale and support in October 2020, we’ve been sharing regular updates to help the Atlassian Community navigate the journey to cloud.
As we quickly approach the final 6-month countdown to the end of server, our teams have been hard at work listening to your feedback, identifying opportunities to better support you and your teams, and making improvements to our cloud offerings and migration capabilities. Our goal is to ensure you have all the latest updates, tools, and resources you need to make your move to cloud as smooth as possible.
In this post, we’ll break down what we’ve been hearing these last couple of quarters and how we’re focusing our efforts to support your cloud migration.
Watch the short video below to catch the key highlights!
Security, data management, and compliance
"Data security is the main issue preventing us from using the cloud. Up until recently Atlassian didn't have a solution for customer-managed keys."
One of the many benefits of moving to cloud is the ability to “expand” your team through Atlassian. We share in the responsibility of protecting your data, allowing your teams to increase your focus on innovation. In addition to our team of experts, we provide a number of capabilities that enable your teams to defend against the growing threats of cybercrime and fulfill regulatory demands.
One example is the recent launch of our early access program (EAP) for BYOK encryption for Jira issues, which is currently available as part of the Cloud Enterprise plan. This is the first of many BYOK launches, including the launch of Confluence BYOK encryption early next year.
In addition to BYOK encryption, we introduced information security controls that empower admins with data security policies to protect data, starting with the ability to restrict Confluence export (EAP). Coming soon is the EAP for the ability to allow/block all marketplace apps in Confluence.
In order to help your teams stay on top of suspicious behavior in your Atlassian cloud products, we also introduced Beacon, a new set of anomaly detection capabilities, currently available in EAP.
As we make investments in information security, we continue to improve and extend identity and access management capabilities. We opened the EAP for external user security and will be adding the EAP for SSO for Jira Service Management customer-only accounts soon.
Protecting your organization means more than just safeguarding your data from threats. It’s also about ensuring you’re meeting the demands of the ever-evolving compliance regulations. The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) amends and expands on the original California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) from 2018. The new regulations provide comprehensive consumer privacy legislation with regard to the collection and sale of personal information. In order to address these new regulations, we’ve updated our data processing addendum and privacy policy.
In the last few months, we’ve also expanded our coverage for data residency to include Jira Work Management and Opsgenie in Jira Service Management, and we’ve introduced Singapore as a new region to ensure you can uphold external and internal regulatory demands.
Last but not least, we made several improvements to our data portability controls with new early access programs for copy product data and backup & restore that enable you to move your data more seamlessly and reliably than ever before!
Apps and integrations
“We have a host of apps working wonders for us in Confluence. In fact, entire ‘frameworks’ have been set up using dozens if not hundreds of macros. Most if not all of these frameworks (e.g. our ISO 27001-ready Information Security Management system) will break upon migration due to the lack of apps and/or the lack of supported macros in these apps, and/or the inability of some apps to be nested inside one another.”
Atlassian is continuing to work with our Marketplace Partners to ensure they have what they need to build cloud versions of their apps that perform the same key functions. We also encourage partners to document any differences in functionality between their server and cloud apps, and include them in the Migration Details section of their app listings on Atlassian Marketplace.
If you find that an app or a key app use case is not available in cloud, we recommend you review our App Alternatives documentation to see if there are alternative apps that perform a similar functionality.
For those of you looking for more cloud apps to extend the value of your Atlassian products, the range available on Atlassian Marketplace is growing every day. Head to the Atlassian Marketplace to browse more of the cloud apps that have recently been added.
To learn more about how to begin assessing your apps in preparation for a move to cloud, visit the app assessment page offered as part of the Atlassian Migration Program. You can also leverage the new Privacy & Security tab on the Marketplace to streamline your app security assessments. We recommend starting your app assessment early, especially if you have multiple apps to assess.
Scale and performance
“Our team in the US can access it just as fast as in Australia. Previously our on-prem instance was run out of Melbourne, and was slow for half the company.”
In March we announced the general availability of 50,000 users on Confluence and 10,000 agents for Jira Service Management. This is part of our continued commitment to meeting enterprise needs at scale and ensuring that scale and speed go hand-in-hand.
For instance, we’ve enhanced Jira Software Cloud experiences such as issue view, board, backlog, and issue navigator, resulting in a 1.5x increase in speed over the past two years! We’ve also improved Confluence Cloud experiences such as page and edit load resulting in as much as a 4x increase in speed over the past two years!
Meeting the scale and performance expectations of our customers remains among our top priorities. We’ll continue to provide you with regular updates through Community and on our Cloud Roadmap as work progresses.
Set up, configuration, and administration
“The ongoing level of effort dedicated to expanding the feature set and improving integrations between portfolio products, coupled with the flexibility in those products to allow us to deliver exactly what we need in terms of work management, etc, is incredible.”
As a Cloud admin, Atlassian Administration (admin.atlassian.com) is your one-stop shop to access the customizations, insights, and controls you need to effectively manage teams across your organization.
It is critical that you have centralized user management across all Cloud products. Most recently, we’ve added Trello into admin.atlassian.com for our Enterprise plan and for Atlassian Together. We’ve also added SCIM for Trello, meaning you can now enable authentication settings and identify which identity provider directory you want to enable for SCIM provisioning under the Security tab in Atlassian Administration. We’re excited that our Bitbucket integration to admin.atlassian.com is coming later this year.
In addition to centralizing Trello and Bitbucket, we’ve also launched a new admin role - the user admin. This new role allows you, as an org admin, to assign specific team members to manage product access for your organization’s users on a per product basis. For example, you can assign one person managing your users' access to Confluence and a different person for Jira - freeing up time and allowing for some much needed delegation.
In Cloud, you unlock advanced customizations and insights. This past quarter, we launched Custom Domains for Jira Service Management Help Center into early-access, with general availability coming soon. Now, you can create a branded subdomain for your organization. In addition, we’re continuing to invest in more insights, like expanding the User Counts feature to include trending charts and an email notification for license capacity planning.
We also recognize the need for expanded controls to take action on user activity. Previously, we developed Automatic Product Discovery, which gives admins a view of user-created instances in Cloud. With Product Requests, which is approaching early-access, you will now have the ability to block users from spinning up their own instances for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management without admin permission. This is a significant milestone in providing you administrative controls to combat this form shadow IT.
Lastly, we are happy to announce that the ability to flatten nested groups between AzureAD and Atlassian Access to assist in cloud migrations is now generally available!
As always, we encourage you to follow this and other enhancements we’re delivering for Administration on our Cloud Roadmap.
Pricing and packaging
“Cost, migration effort, having to pay for the cloud while also paying for the server solution.”
Today’s market conditions are forcing all teams to carefully evaluate their investment decisions, but the good news is that Atlassian’s cloud products and solutions are purpose-built to help you drive the business outcomes you care about, like accelerating developer productivity and delivering exceptional service.
We launched this resource that can help you build your business case for cloud and assess the costs and benefits of migrating.
A few important stats to call out from a recent Forrester report as you evaluate and assess:
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358% average ROI realized by teams migrating to Jira Software Cloud
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+20% productivity boost for developers following a migration to Jira Software Cloud
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+50% time reallocated by IT teams to more impactful work, leading to a 95% CSAT score
And from a TechValidate survey of users who migrated to cloud versions of Jira Software, Confluence, and/or Jira Service Management:
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43% reported an increase in the speed of quality code shipped
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47% reported an increase in cross-functional collaboration
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42% reported an increase in overall productivity
Transforming on cloud is an investment in your business, which is why we offer customers a free cloud migration trial that you can use to explore cloud-only value and build a proof of concept. You can also use the trial as you plan your migration and when you’re ready to migrate, we encourage looking into eligibility for step-up credits to avoid losing the value of your unused server maintenance. Customers who purchase an annual cloud subscription with 1,001 or more users (Jira Software, Jira Work Management, or Confluence) or 251 or more agents (Jira Service Management) can also save on costs and avoid double paying with dual licensing.
The process of migrating
“We are consolidating several instances of Jira from different companies and wish to clean up, standardize and consolidate first before we try to migrate a mess over to cloud. We are also hoping for a better transition to cloud for things like Jira Automation, Scriptrunner, JSU and JMWE.”
We’ve heard your feedback over the last quarter and we know that despite being easier, migrations are still not easy. We are continually working to create a future where the process of migrating is smoother and intuitive, driven by tools, resources, and support. Since our last update, we’ve focused on optimizing the end-to-end migration experience with targeted improvements to our Cloud Migration Assistants (CMAs) improving the visibility into your migration, performance, and usability.
Visibility
We know that the most successful migrations happen when admins take the time to understand and prepare their data for cloud before migrating, avoiding unnecessary failed migration tests at the end of their journey. To that effect, we’ve made several improvements to our Cloud Migration Assistants (CMAs) that allow users to better assess and clean-up their data. You can now assess your user data prior to your migration, proactively correcting or deleting any invalid or duplicate users with a click of a button.
We’ve also enhanced our pre-check capabilities for both Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA) and Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant (CCMA) adding a new pre-flight check for the container token. This feature will notify you in the case of an expired cloud token and provide you with the option to renew the token through the migration gateway, eliminating an unexpected failure.
Scale and performance
We also know having fast and predictable production migrations are non-negotiable, so we’ve prioritized making our migration tooling more performant allowing you to focus more on “what gets migrated” and less on “how and when it can be migrated.”
CCMA migrations are now ~7 to 12 times faster after making significant investments in how CCMA exports data from Server and Data Center. Similarly, in JCMA we’ve enhanced our issue importing and exporting capabilities, which has resulted in a 3x increase in speed over the last 6 months! But it doesn’t stop there! We recently launched migrate-all-data-at-once to replace Site Import for JCMA which offers migrators a more streamlined user experience for migrating data in bulk with proactive scanning that mitigates errors before your migration. Migrate-all-data-at-once is exceeding Site Import benchmarks by 34%!
User experience
And finally, we’ve enhanced our tooling and created new resources that make the experience of migrating more straightforward. We’ve built out resources to help you create a plan for your migration, and a Cloud Adoption Toolkit to help your team confidently navigate every step of your cloud assessment and adoption journeys, in one centralized place. In the near future, we plan to introduce automation to the assessment process helping improve and expedite the experience.
We hope that these investments continue to help you on your migration journey. Plan your migration now
I’ll close this update with a recap of the heaps of innovation we’ve been delivering across our cloud platform and solutions that help teams deliver value faster, collaborate more effectively, and operate more efficiently.
In addition to what we’ve already covered, the top 5 new products and capabilities I’m most excited about today are:
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Atlassian Intelligence (EAP): your new virtual teammate that accelerates your work with the power of AI through internal models and our collaboration with OpenAI.
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Atlassian Analytics: which gives you pre-modeled and enriched data in the platform. That way, you can start actioning on your data immediately and can use that data to drive accountability to goals and make informed decisions on how to allocate resources.
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Jira Product Discovery: a dedicated tool for product teams to capture and prioritize ideas, connect business and tech teams, and get teams aligned.
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Confluence Whiteboards: A new digital canvas to brainstorm, turn ideas into action, and visualize work
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Confluence external collaboration and announcement banners: giving Confluence admins the ability to securely add guest collaborators to specific spaces and to communicate broadly with their teams through banners.
Let us know what you’re most excited about trying.
Thank you again to all of you who continue to share your feedback. Your input helps us shape our approach to delivering a world-class cloud experience. In addition to these updates, our Cloud Roadmap and Data Center Roadmap continue to be the go-to sources to follow our progress. You can also ‘Watch’ this article to be notified when we share our next update.
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Sarah Joshi
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