When to use cloud to cloud migrations

[#1]

Hello everyone! Last month we hosted our annual Team event and welcomed customers from around the world (in-person and virtually) to the ultimate teamwork experience and Atlassian’s flagship conference, Team ‘22. If you missed the event or need a refresher, we’ve put together two recaps - one for anyone considering a cloud migration and another for those already on Cloud and interested in deeper product usage.

In addition to the incredible product announcements and customer stories shared at Team, we also had several conversations with customers asking us to make the management of their instances easier, specifically data migration. Many were excited to hear that we actually offer cloud-to-cloud migration (C2C) tooling for Jira Software. While this feature is currently in Beta, we've seen customers of all sizes finding the tool a stable and quick way to port their data between cloud sites to address:

• Mergers and acquisitions - new teams may join your organization or you may want to continue to administer those teams separately, with cloud to cloud migrations, you can pick and choose what data moves over and what stays the same

• Performance and scale - as the number of users grows from 1,000 to 50,000 what was once easy to organize in one instance may be more efficient to split up by department or project, allowing each team the autonomy to create their own workflows

• Data segregation and security - when using contractors or external vendors, move the data they need into a new instance, while keeping the rest of your data, especially sensitive data, secure behind different layers of authentication

• Moving to Enterprise - unlock access to unlimited sites and shift your strategy from creating environments based on administrative ease to what's meaningful for each team

These are just a few examples of how customers are using our cloud-to-cloud migration tooling. In the rare case that customers would like to use this tooling for testing, we recommend using Sandboxes instead. A sandbox is an isolated environment where you can test and experiment before making changes to production and is available to customers on our Premium and Enterprise plans.

If you have any questions, please comment below. We’re continuing the make improvements to this space all the time! Keep track of these changes in our roadmap.

Cheers,

Swarna

[Sri Kumar]

Hi @Swarna Mehta 

Thanks for sharing this 

[Dave Liao]

Is testing a "rare case"?

I actually like the idea of regularly performing C2C migrations to copy parts of a production environment to a Sandbox. 🙌

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Swarna Mehta , there is an extra bracket at the end of the link for the Cloud roadmap that makes it break. Please can you correct this? Cloud Roadmap | Atlassian Thanks!

[Swarna Mehta]

@Dave Liao thanks for your question.
Testing is not a rare use case. However, Sandox is better suited for testing the C2C. So we recommend Sandbox. However, there is nothing preventing customers from using C2C for the same even though it may not be ideal for that use case.

[Hana Kučerová]

Last time I needed cloud to cloud migration, three companies were merging together after the acquisition. Unfortunately their users had different e-mail domains, which needed to be changed and consolidated too, that’s why I had to migrate it through the DC. It would be great, if these kind of changes are possible too.

[Steven Rhodes]

We use the cloud to cloud to migrate a customers project back to their instance. To get moving very quickly we start work on our instance and then at some point either during or at the project end will migrate this data to their side.

The migration tool is very buggy however and crashes, and also migrates A LOT of things which we don't need like all the users, all the groups, and all the custom fields regardless of whether they were used or part of the project. For this reason we use a test instance, to migrate into and if it doesnt crash, we then clean up that instance and then migrate to the client instance. Using the middle test instance also helps because the client is unlikely to grant us site-admin on their site in order to perform the migration.

Its very messy, very time consuming and unreliable. It works. barely.

[Swarna Mehta]

@Steven Rhodes Thanks for your feedback. While the tool was in Open Beta, there were a bunch of reliability and scale issues that we were actively working on. We have come a long way since then, and are seeing good reliability.

Based on cross-channel feedback (including yours!), I am happy to report that we have also introduced features like scoped users and groups that cuts down on unnecessary user data movement across sites.

We have added support for team-managed projects and have also launched our EAP for JSM and Open Beta for Confluence.

We continue to improve the feature set as we understand the value this brings to our customers. Please continue to provide feedback so that we can keep making this feature a great asset to our customers.