Merge of three cloud sites

[#1]

We were asked by one of our customers to help them merge three cloud sites together – data from two smaller cloud sites had to be merged into the big company site after the acquisition of two companies.

Usually we try to clean everything up before the migration, but our customer was in the time pressure. We’ve decided to do the cleanup after the merge, because the target instance also needed refactoring and complete revision. We only invested more time to the usage analysis of the applications, some of them were paid and this would mean billing increase in the future. Also cloud to cloud migration of the apps can be complicated. In the end we were able to get rid of almost all the applications.

In the beginning we wanted to use cloud to cloud migration native functionality, but it wasn’t possible. The main problem here was the users had old e-mail domains and these needed to be changed. Moreover some users were using two or even three accounts to access the same cloud site. So the goal here was to merge all the data together under one user account with the correct e-mail, so that the user will be able to see all the history and activity under the appropriate account. Because of this, we’ve divided the migration into the smaller migrations with the usage of DC instance. 

First of all data from the first cloud site was imported into the clean DC instance, then user accounts were merged and then the data were migrated to the target cloud site using JCMA. After we tested everything, the second cloud site was processed in the same way.

After both migrations we had to perform minor manual fixes in the configuration in the target cloud site, but overall everything went well and users were able to start working immediately after the migration weekend.

[Vish Reddy _Revyz_]

Hi @Hana Kučerová 

Thank you for sharing your experience in merging multiple cloud sites together.

I am part of Revyz. I would love your feedback on the apps we have built to manage data and configuration in the cloud.

In addition to addressing the need for cloud backup of data and configuration our apps help cloud customers in copying data & configuration from one cloud site to another in a very selective and granular manner. 

I would love to chat with to get your feedback to see how we can further improve!

Thank you

Vish

[Bibek Behera]

@Hana Kučerová , 

Could you please provide some more insights on what the apps and what manual fixes were done post-migration? Were the fixes app-specific or something in Jira itself to make things work?

Thanks,

Bek

[Ben Borecki]

Hi @Hana KučerováI am happy to see that you've managed to merge the users under appropriate accounts. However importing cloud site into DC and then migrating the data to cloud again, doesn't seem perfect.

Together with my dev team we're exploring possible solutions to prevent this problem:

>The main problem here was the users had old e-mail domains and these needed to be changed. Moreover some users were using two or even three accounts to access the same cloud site.

@Hana Kučerová what are your suggestions for possible solutions that would ease your experience in described use case?

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Vish Reddy _Revyz_ , thanks for reaching out. I'm aware of your apps. If I use them, I will let you know.

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Bibek Behera ,

in the end we were migrating automations and integration apps like GitHub for Jira.

Fixes were made mostly in permission schemes, dashboards, boards, workflows... smaller adjustments in Jira itself.

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Ben Borecki ,

to be honest I don't understand your question fully. I will try to be more specific and hopefully this will answer your question.

Because three companies were merging together, users were using e-mail addresses (-> Atlassian accounts) of both companies and also some of them have created JSM customer account.

As you probably know, there are several methods how to perform cloud-to-cloud migration and we have chosen the second one because of the necessity of merge of the user accounts (there are database queries available for such operations). 

If we have the easier way how to merge accounts together in cloud or somehow configure, that account A should be transformed to account B during the migration, we would perform a cloud-to-cloud migration.

[Ben Borecki]

 @Hana Kučerová thanks for sharing more details, you answered my question!

[Krista Stellar]

Thanks for sharing - this is good information as we have noticed as a Solutions Partner that the types of migrations we are starting to see are similar to this: a combination of cloud to cloud, server to cloud and merging instances. Your approach to think outside the box and go to DC and then cloud is creative. Glad it worked out for you.

[Hana Kučerová]

Thank you @Krista Stellar