Join our EAP to execute your Data Center to Cloud migration from Atlassian Administration

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community,

Managing multiple cloud migrations across products can be quite challenging, often requiring admins to juggle many tools and execute different tasks in parallel. We recognize that for some admins this can lead to inefficiencies and increase the complexity of your migrations. To help, we are introducing a new, more streamlined way to execute your Data Center to Cloud migrations. Read on to learn more.

Introducing: Cloud-first migration execution experience EAP

We are launching the Cloud-first migration execution experience early access program (EAP). Participants in this EAP will be able to launch, edit, and monitor their Data Center to Cloud migration plans directly from Atlassian Administration. This differs from the traditional migration flow of executing and managing migrations from the Cloud Migration Assistants (CMAs), which are plugins downloaded from Atlassian Marketplace to your Data Center instances.

❗The CMAs will remain an option for executing migrations, and downloading the latest version of the CMA plugins is necessary to participate in this EAP.

What's in it for me?

By executing your Data Center to Cloud migration from Atlassian Administration, you’ll get access to new functionalities not currently available through the traditional migration flow. See the differences between the current CMA experience and new EAP experience outlined in the table below.

What does the new experience look like?

The new experience has a comprehensive dashboard to manage all your migration plans (including those initiated from CMA plugins and migration APIs) all in one place.

The dashboard provides plan details, including a progress view of the time elapsed since each plan's creation, as well as completion status.

Who is the EAP for?

This EAP is for organizations with 10,000 or fewer users who are currently undergoing or planning to migrate Jira, Jira Service Management, and/or Confluence data from Data Center to Cloud. We hope to expand this EAP in the future to allow larger organizations to participate.

I’m interested, how can I join this EAP?

1️⃣  If you’re interested in participating in this EAP, the first step is to read the user guide.

⚠️ Please note:

• Org admin permissions are required to execute migrations from Atlassian Administration.

• For Jira and Jira Service Management Data Center to Cloud migrations, JCMA 1.12.19 or later is required. You can download or upgrade JCMA by going to Atlassian Marketplace.

• For Confluence Data Center to Cloud migrations, CCMA 3.11.2 or later is required. You can download or upgrade CCMA by going to Atlassian Marketplace.

2️⃣ Next, you must opt-in to join this EAP and access its features. You can opt-in in two different ways:

1. Opt-in to the EAP by clicking this link! or,

2. Opt-in to the EAP within JCMA or CCMA via the EAP banner. While in the CMAs select the “Go to Atlassian Administration” option in the banner (see image below).

Thank you!

We’re excited for your participation in this EAP and are eager to hear your feedback and insights as we continue to enhance this feature. To share your feedback or surface any issues, please contact Atlassian Support.

Thank you for helping us create a more efficient migration experience for everyone!

The Atlassian Migrations Team

[Tim Eddelbüttel]

What is the use-case to implement this? Which problem does this solve? From my point of view, it's just an additional layer and one more context switching. 

Usually, a person that is responsible for migrating Jira & Confluence would most likely not start booth at the same time. He would go to Confluence and do the Confluence magic. Same for Jira. Each application itself requires some special handling (e.g. turn it into read-only, etc.)

So going into admin.atlassian.com would be just another additional step and context switch!

Also did you consider, that Enterprise customer running instances behind the firewall and you can't access the instances from the outside?

Did improvements follow an API first approach? Usually, admin.atlassian.com is really limited when it comes to API interactions.

[Rahil Hameed]

Thanks for your feedback, Tim!

To clarify the use case for the Cloud-First Migration Execution Experience: the goal is to centralize all migration efforts in one place, making it easier to track and manage migrations—whether you’re moving Jira and Confluence together, or handling migrations through APIs or CMAs. This approach gives admins a clear overview of all ongoing migrations, reducing the complexity of managing multiple tools and efforts separately.

In the longer term, this is an initial step towards converging and building a consistent experience across Data Center to Cloud migration and Cloud to Cloud migration.

Regarding your point about simultaneous migrations, many enterprises are choosing to migrate both Jira and Confluence to the cloud at the same time. This is proving helpful in several ways: avoids duplicating work down the road, and offers a smoother onboarding experience for end users while  reducing operational complexity, . Additionally, for some customers, migrating both tools together makes sense from a cost-efficiency and budget planning perspective, as it allows them to consolidate transition costs and reduce the long-term maintenance of self-managed infrastructures.

As for the concern about the additional step of using admin.atlassian.com, while it might feel like an extra layer, this centralized approach  streamlines the migration process by reducing the need to switch between different tools. It gives a more detailed progress view of all migrations in one place, rather than needing to check multiple systems.

For customers running instances behind firewalls, we recognize this challenge. To perform a migration, they will need to whitelist certain cloud endpoints to allow the connection, which is a necessary step in any cloud migration. We’ll be gathering feedback during the EAP to understand these challenges and further enhance the overall experience for future iterations.

On the API-first approach: our MAPI strategy is designed to address complex needs, and we’re continuously working to improve our API interactions to ensure they meet the demands of our customers.

We’ll be gathering feedback from early adopters of the EAP, and your input is invaluable as we continue refining the experience to improve cloud migration efficiency, so again, thanks!

 Rahil Hameed

Senior Product Manager, Atlassian