End of server sale & support – June 2022 update
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28 September 2022: Thanks for your interest in how work is progressing on Atlassian Cloud Migration. There's a new End of server sale & support – September 2022 update now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
Hi Atlassian Community, it’s time for my latest update on how we’re progressing on the work related to delivering a world-class cloud experience for our customers.
It's always been important to me that we listen and act on our customer’s feedback, and now as the Head of Enterprise Product at Atlassian, it's even more essential to share what we’re hearing and how we’re responding to the key themes we hear from customers like you, in order to find better ways to support your journey to the cloud.
Security, data management and compliance
”Getting rid of server editions and pushing for cloud makes sense, but only when there are cloud regions that support us like in Canada as we and many other clients have strict data residency requirements.”
We remain committed to delivering on the foundational capabilities that ensure each and every customer should be able to implicitly trust our cloud products. This includes tools to confidently manage your data, an industry-leading security posture and certifications for the regulatory requirements in your industry and geography. We’ve set a high bar for what we plan to achieve and we’ve reached some significant new milestones and updated several of our plans on our Cloud Roadmap.
Data management
We believe in putting our customers in control of where their data is stored and what they can do with it, while still experiencing the full benefits of SaaS.
Since my last update, we’ve had even more interest in large Data Residency migrations than we anticipated, so we’ve invested in the underlying platforms to allow us to open up more self-service migration slots to all customers. In addition to our previously-announced plans to expand the available locations to the UK, Japan and Canada in the first half of 2023, we now expect to add Germany in the same timeframe.
We are now looking for sign-ups to our Early Access Program for a much faster Jira Cloud backup and restore service, with a release of our Backup API expected in Q3 2022, and Restore API in Q1 2023. Finally, we’re pleased to share that we’ll be adding Jira Service Management (Q4 2022) and Confluence (Q3 2023) to our current beta of Jira Software cloud-to-cloud migrations.
Visit our Cloud Roadmap to see all of the upcoming Data Management milestones.
Compliance
For many of our customers, compliance with industry regulations around the world is critical to selecting a SaaS vendor. With this in mind, we continue to invest in the compliance of our enterprise platform.
In my last update, I shared that we'd launched HIPAA compliance for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud. We now have plans on our public roadmap to improve the HIPAA end-user experience by enabling emails and notifications and to expand the availability of HIPAA to Jira Service Management and beyond the current minimum user tiers for Cloud Enterprise plans.
We also continue our major investment in platform capabilities and architectural changes to support achieving an Authority to Operate under FedRAMP Moderate for Jira and Confluence in 2023.
You can explore our current certifications in our Compliance Resource Center, and all upcoming Compliance milestones on our Cloud Roadmap.
Security
We recognize that our customers need the security controls to effectively adapt to the complexity of the modern environment, embrace a mobile workforce, and protect people, devices, applications, and data wherever they're located. We plan to continue investing in building these controls, so that you can completely trust our enterprise platform.
We have heard your feedback that existing controls on API tokens are insufficient. We plan to act on this feedback by expanding the administrator controls to improve the security and auditability of API tokens.
Since the last update, we’re continuing to add to the Mobile App Management (MAM) feature set. We are working on blocking compromised devices from accessing your data in the Atlassian cloud. We're also building controls for trusted Atlassian mobile apps to bypass IP Allowlisting policies, to enable a frictionless collaboration experience for your users on the go.
BYOK, expanding Audit log coverage, unmanaged user security and app access data controls also continue to remain a top priority for our teams and we're working to deliver these capabilities to you.
Learn more about our upcoming Security capabilities on our Cloud Roadmap.
The process of migrating
“The migration process itself. I want to ensure it's seamless to our end-users.”
Based on your feedback, we’re continuing to enhance our tooling and processes to better support your Cloud migration.
We’ve now shipped application tunnels, allowing you to securely connect Atlassian Cloud products with your existing Data Center or Server instances, without exposing your network or allowlisting any incoming connections or IPs.
We’ve also been listening to your feedback on the challenges of user migration. We’re currently working on product improvements that will allow you to bulk fix users with invalid or duplicate emails, and we’ll soon be publishing new guidance on migrating nested groups.
Lastly, we’ve improved our guidance on key topics to better answer the questions you’re asking. We’ve made significant improvements to our migration assessment, delivering better, personalized recommendations to help you plan out your journey. You can also access new feature comparisons for Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, and Bitbucket, making it easier to compare Cloud and Data products side by side.
We’ve also invested resources in helping you identify alternatives for apps that are not available in cloud. We now have a list of over 70 recommended alternatives to popular Jira and Confluence Server and Data Center apps. Discover our list of recommended alternatives.
In addition to bringing new apps to cloud, we’re also working with Marketplace Partners to bring you migration paths for your app data. Today, we have over 200 apps with migration paths, and more than half of those are automated using the Jira and Confluence Cloud Migration Assistants. Discover all the Atlassian Marketplace apps with migration paths.
If you’re in the planning phase, be sure to check out our new Cloud adoption toolkit, offering a suite of best practices, email templates, and admin guides to help you successfully onboard your users to Cloud.
Wondering where to start? Join us on June 15 for an overview of the migration process in our Cloud migration demo. You’ll learn things like how to choose your migration strategy and method, the key steps to complete in each stage of the journey, and what your migration runbook should include. Atlassian’s Cloud Migration Managers will be standing by for live Q&A at the end, to answer any of your questions.
Apps and integrations
”… Cloud Apps! Apps! Apps! The ability to internconnect our JIRA tickets to Asana #tasks and Slack #channels is, well, truly priceless. We love Atlassian Cloud. A lot. Like a whole lot. Like maybe bit too much. We just migrated from self-hosted to cloud and this change has filled in a LOT of gaps and features we've been missing for years.”
Our customers regularly tell us they rely on a mix of Marketplace apps and apps they develop in-house to extend the value they get from their Atlassian products, so we continue to increase investment in bringing more apps to Cloud.
Since our latest Cloud App Round-up, our developer community has added more than 100 new cloud apps to the Atlassian Marketplace including favorites like Easy Integrations for Jira, TestRay (formerly synapseRT) Test Management for Jira, Column Order Gadget Plugin and Tree View for Confluence.
A host of new Jira and Confluence apps were also created during our Codegeist hackathon and listed on Marketplace. They include new custom field management tools, Confluence page linking and label tools, and new integrations with Medium, Hubspot, and more.
We're also supporting the migration of custom apps and the development of new cloud apps with our developer platform, Forge. Forge continues to add new extension points and capabilities for more robust apps and use cases, including External Authentication which makes it easier to build Forge apps that connect with platforms like Google, Slack, GitHub, and many more. Learn more about Getting started with Forge development.
Lastly, we’re committed to helping customers navigate the nuanced landscape of cloud app security to ensure Marketplace apps meet your needs. Our Cloud App Availability and Security webinar with Jon Mort, CTO of Adaptavist (the company behind popular apps like ScriptRunner for Jira), and the Atlassian Marketplace team shares more detail about our investments in this area.
Scale and performance
”Faster response time, no need for a VPN, better search options and overall sleeker experience.”
Meeting the performance and scale expectations that you have for your Atlassian products continues to be one of our top priorities.
In March, we shared a Quarterly Cloud performance and scale update that showed some of the biggest performance gains that we’ve made across key experiences in Jira Software and Confluence as a result of these investments. We also outlined the large-scale program that we launched to make our Cloud products even faster. We’ll continue to provide you with regular updates through Community and on the Cloud Roadmap.
We’re also excited to announce that we’re increasing the number of users supported on a single instance of Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud from 20,000 to 35,000 later this year. While this is a huge win, we want to continue to partner with you to ensure that as we increase the number of users that can be supported on a single instance that we’re addressing your unique use cases. We’re currently running an early access program for 50,000 users per instance. If you’re interested in participating or want to learn more, please contact our Enterprise Advocates team.
Set up, configuration and administration
”Allow teams to manage the user groups that they use for access. Set credential limits for 3rd party users that access our sites.”
We understand that without more visibility on a user’s access across all products, it can make it difficult to understand exactly what a user has access to and how different groups affect that user's access.
The recently released Organization-level user and group administration means that customers can now have a single location across all Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence products, to manage user access. And we’re one step closer to centralizing all user access information, not just for our core products. For more detail on how we’ve simplified admin screens, read User management for cloud admins just got easier.
We plan to continue investing in granular admin roles, centralizing permissions and simplifying administration. This will be a major priority for the Cloud Administration team moving forward. You can find out more about our plans for granular admin roles and centralized permissions view via our Cloud Roadmap for Administration and Community articles.
In response to admins who told us they are looking for greater control to preview, test, and prepare end-users for changes to their instance, we developed Release Tracks and Sandboxes.
Release Tracks offer the ability to opt-in to updates from Atlassian in a fixed monthly window and additional predictability for changes coming to your instance; while Sandboxes provide the ability to test any changes or new feature roll-outs before they get to production and ensure everything works the way it should.
Customers can also license their marketplace apps for free in their sandbox, provided they have a paid version on their production site and it’s now easier to Track organization activities in your Sandbox from the audit log.
Admins will also soon be able to view release notes and get updates for changes rolling out to your organization’s products via admin.atlassian.com. You can follow this and other enhancements we’re delivering for Administration on our Cloud Roadmap.
Pricing and packaging
”We are now able to reduce server maintenance. We have also been able to consolidate projects and experience different features.”
Our migrated customers continue to share how their teams are unlocking productivity benefits and winning back valuable time for their teams. To help quantify that ROI, we connected Forrester with decision-makers at two enterprise organizations who had sought to increase software delivery speeds as well as improve agile and DevOps practices within their organizations while migrating Jira Software Data Center to Cloud.
The resulting Total Economic Impact Cloud Migration Spotlight concluded that these organizations saw an average ROI of 358%, resulting in increased developer productivity, increased IT specialist productivity, and decreased software licensing costs.
A senior manager of IT shared: “Jira Software Cloud is a much better experience because it’s much more modern, much more responsive. After we migrated from Data Center to Cloud, our own staff — who are both our best critics and our best customers — said, ‘This is refreshing. This is a step up from what we had before.’ Then they said, ‘We can do things in Cloud that we couldn’t do before. … This is great. This actually improves what I’m doing.’”
In order to help you realize these benefits sooner, we have a few updates on incentives and discounts:
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We’ve extended our Cloud migration trial promotion. As a Server or Data Center customer with more than 60 days left of active maintenance, you can access 12 months free in Cloud if you claim your trial by August 15, 2022. Use your free Cloud migration trial to explore Cloud features, create a proof and concept, and run a test migration at your own pace.
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To help eliminate cost barriers and enable you to begin your journey sooner, we’ve introduced step-up credits for eligible customers that (when applied to your Cloud subscription) equal the pro-rated value of unused Server or Data Center maintenance contracts. This ensures you can realize the full contract value of your Server maintenance before migrating to Cloud.
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It’s also a good time to remind eligible customers that our loyalty discount rates for Cloud and Data Center will be changing on July 1, 2022 PT per the annual discount rate schedule established at the end of the Server sale and support announcement. For most Cloud products, the loyalty discount will be dropping from 40% to 20%, meaning there’s no better time to begin assessing a migration if you haven’t started yet.
Rename 'epics'
Lastly, to support the variety of Agile frameworks practiced today, we're introducing the ability to rename Epics in Jira Software to a name of your choice, we’ve seen this feature receive particular demand from customers trying to implement a SAFe issue hierarchy (Story → Feature → Epic).
The renamed Epic will be supported all throughout Jira (boards, backlogs, roadmaps, reports and JQL), giving your teams a consistent experience. You can read more about this feature in Rename ‘epics’ in your company-managed projects.
We’re expecting to have our Epic renaming beta ready in July 2022, ahead of a full feature release in 2023. The beta is an excellent chance for you to test out the changes, prepare guides and training materials for your teams, and provide us with feedback so we can improve it for you. Follow the Rename ‘epics’ in your company-managed projects post to be notified when the beta is available to join.
As you can see from this and our previous updates, we remain committed to listening to customer feedback in order to make certain we’re focusing time, effort and investment on addressing the challenges that customers share with us.
Follow our progress via our Cloud Roadmap or watch this article to receive a notification when I share my next update in a few months.
– Partha
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