Your top server end of support questions answered (Q&A from our latest webinar)

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community!

Support for server products ends February 15, 2024, which means we’re now less than 11 months away. As we embark on this final phase, we want to make sure you have all the latest tools and resources to ensure a smooth journey to Cloud or Data Center.

I recently hosted a live webinar + Q&A with @Dhiren Pardhanani, General Manager of Cloud Migrations and Data Center R&D and Programs. If you're a server customer and want to get up to speed on what server support means for you and what to do next, I'd definitely watch the recording. 

We received a lot of great questions but we weren’t able to get to all of them. So, in this post, we’ll cover the most popular ones. 

Migration Guidance, Assessment, Tooling, and Support

We see the average cloud migration taking 9 months from assessment to launch depending on your size and complexity, so it’s critical to start planning now. Take the first step with the Atlassian Migration Program, where we've we’ve distilled the most critical resources and learnings into a single one-stop-shop. Get the tools, support, guidance, and promotions you need to migrate with confidence.

Cloud prerequisites

1. When will "Assets" offer at least the same functionality as the on-premise version (e.g. data discovery, import, etc.)? We continue to prioritize development around features like additional import methods, scalability, and UI enhancements for Assets in Jira Service Management Cloud. We recommend following the cloud roadmap link here to watch for upcoming releases in addition to the Jira Service Management section of the Atlassian Community.
   
   

2. We use Bitbucket Server - what are my options? You can explore Bitbucket Cloud today by starting a free trial where you can explore and assess cloud’s latest and newest functionality. If you’re planning on keeping your Bitbucket instance self-managed explore how Bitbucket Data Center can be seamlessly connected to Jira Cloud.
   
   Our latest Community update on our Bitbucket Cloud roadmap shares the details of how we're building Bitbucket Cloud for enhanced security, compliance, and scale. 
   
   

3. Our apps aren’t available on cloud, what do you recommend we do? This is a great time to assess your app portfolio and determine what functionality is critical, if there are apps you no longer need, and if there are new cloud apps that meet your needs better than the ones you have now (there are now more cloud apps than on-premise apps on the Atlassian Marketplace and the number of cloud apps is increasing 52% YoY). So how do you determine which app data is critical to migrate? This can be a tricky task, so we’ve outlined a couple of different approaches you can take: 

• Use our Cloud Migration Assistants to determine which of your Server apps are available in Cloud, and also how functionality might differ between the Server version and the Cloud version of your apps. If specific apps or functionality aren’t available in cloud, then we’d recommend looking into our app alternatives to understand how to fill those gaps.
• Get in touch with your app champions and power users. They can't only tell you how much they’re using the app (and investigate how much others are using it), but they can also help you evaluate cloud equivalents and ensure the cloud alternative has all the functionality they need. 
• Try an app burndown method. This is potentially the most extreme and, as a result, may not be appropriate for every organization. The idea here is to "shut off" various apps in the time leading up to your migration to understand whether they are critical or not. As you do this, you’ll know whether or not you need to migrate certain apps because you will get feedback from end-users that they need access to it again. If you need additional help navigating this process, our network of Solution Partners are always here to help.

Migration Guidance

1. What happens after server support ends? After the end of support date, Atlassian and Marketplace partners will no longer provide technical support for any issues, security updates, or bug fixes for vulnerabilities. That means you run an outsized risk of exposing your users and data to harmful viruses, spyware, and malicious attacks. You may also find that you’re no longer able to satisfy compliance requirements. Although you’ll continue to have access to your server products, we don’t want your business to be unsupported, so we strongly recommend moving to a supported offering before end of support. For a limited time, we’re offering free 12-month cloud migration trials for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence, so that you can explore the latest cloud-only features, do an in-depth assessment of your migration requirements, and build a proof of concept.
   
   
2. How long do cloud migrations take? From assessment to launch, we’ve seen simple migrations take as little as a month, but on average migrations take 9 months. The length of your cloud migration depends on several factors such as data size & shape, project resources, risk tolerance, migration expertise, and more. That’s why we recommend all customers develop their migration plan at least 9 months ahead of the server end of support date.
   
   
3. How can I manage the migration process if I approach the renewal date for my Server license and my Cloud trial is about to expire? Get in touch with our advocate team to discuss your licensing options. If you’re unable to complete your migration prior to your renewal date you can renew your existing server license until February 15th 2024. And if you migrate before February 15th you can take advantage of step-up credits and get the prorated value towards cloud. For migrators with 1,001 or more users you can also take advantage of dual licensing to give yourself more time to migrate with access to Server or Data Center and Cloud for the price of Cloud.
   
   
4. Is there a recommended order for migrating Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket? There’s no recommended order based on product. Deciding which product to migrate entirely depends on what your organization is looking to optimize for. If you’re looking to do a dry run and minimize migration risk you can start with your smallest product license. Or if you’re looking to get specific teams over first, you can start with their projects or spaces. 
   
   
5. What does a phased migration look like? No two phased migrations will be exactly the same, but at its core, a phased migration will allow you to migrate your data in stages, rather than all at once. We recommend choosing stages based on value-specific cohorts, for example, separate servers, products, or active vs. archived/inactive data. As you complete each migration, issues can be worked out and users can be onboarded and trained in smaller groups. Keep in mind though that phased migrations do have their drawbacks, for example, there’s a high potential for configuration drift between self-managed and cloud products. If you’re considering or actively pursuing a cloud migration, we strongly recommend reaching out to Atlassian or a Solution partner to understand all the benefits and drawbacks of this approach and whether it’s the right one for you.

Migration Tooling

1. What if I need to merge two separate server installations into one instance? The question of consolidation or federation can be a complex one, but once you’ve decided what’s right for your organization, there are several ways that you can approach the technical migration. Our recommended approach is to migrate each of your Server instances to the same Cloud site using Cloud Migration Assistants to consolidate your users and data in Cloud. Before you decide which path is right for you, we recommend reaching out for Atlassian migration support to help you understand which approach will work best for your needs.
   
   

2. How are custom workflows migrated? Custom workflows can be migrated via the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA), which supports the migration of 34 workflow rules today. To find more information on which rules are supported see this page.
   
   

3. How are custom fields migrated? You can use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA) to migrate custom fields from your Server or Data Center instance to Cloud. For a list of supported custom fields that can be migrated by JCMA see here; if your custom field isn’t a supported field you can add these fields using the steps outlined here.

Migration Support

1. Is support available during cloud migration trials (i.e. to help us understand the complexity or with other questions that come up)? Yes, depending on the size and complexity of your migration, you’ll receive access to support. And no matter your size, if you find yourself needing more hands-on support, you can enlist the help of a trusted Solution Partner to aid your migration to cloud. Solution Partners are here to help your organization’s specific migration needs, from planning guidance to running the full migration end-to-end. Visit this page to learn more about what support channels are available throughout your migration.
   
   
2. What’s a cloud migration trial? We offer an exclusive free trial called the cloud migration trial (CMT), which is available for up to 12 months to eligible* Server and Data Center customers considering migrating to explore and assess cloud.
   
   
3. Who can I speak to about cloud migration trials? First, we recommend you visit this page to get detailed instructions on what a cloud migration trial (CMT) is, how to get one, and how to best use it. If you still need help, you can contact our team directly, and they’ll help you figure out how to activate your CMT, as well as give you recommendations on how to start your cloud migration journey. For more information about eligibility requirements see this page.
   
   
4. Cloud is more expensive than what I pay for Server today, why should we pay more? We're seeing three evolving market pressures that most teams operate in today that are forcing businesses to constantly transform. 1) In this new post-covid era you need to enable cross-team collaboration & support distributed and hybrid teams working from anywhere. 2) You need to maximize your security posture to prevent and manage the growing threats of data breaches. 3) Macroeconomic pressures may be forcing your business to optimize its current investments to focus on profitability. We believe Cloud products are best positioned to help our customers meet these evolving pressures, which is why our strategy is focused on delivering the best experience on Atlassian Cloud products. Our cloud products provide a complete SaaS solution that helps teams reduce IT overhead, maintenance, hardware costs, and more.

   During a macroeconomic time when it’s important to prioritize both innovation and reducing spend, cloud transformations help you reduce your total cost of ownership. Transitioning to SaaS allows you to save resources spent on infrastructure & maintenance, and instead allows you to allocate back valuable admin and developer time to focus on business priorities. Plus, managing infrastructure and manual upgrades leaves you vulnerable to security risks. Protecting data on-premise is all your responsibility, which is time-consuming, complex, and an outdated approach. But with cloud, security is baked-in, and data protection becomes a shared responsibility, empowering you and giving you the peace of mind you need to innovate faster.

   Additionally, Atlassian cloud solutions are powering modern software development in a way our Server & Data Center tools can't through:

   • Connected tools: Atlassian Cloud allows you to connect best-of-breed tools to one unified platform, keeping your teams in the flow of work with a centralized source of truth.
   • Connected teams: Atlassian Cloud allows you to bring developers, IT, and business teams and stakeholders together from design, product, marketing and operations to collaborate before, during and after delivery consolidating ideas and information across the entire lifecycle.
   • Connected data: The Atlassian Cloud platform is purpose-built to harness data from Atlassian and top SaaS tools to surface actionable insights at every stage of the software development lifecycle. 
     
     This means you’re getting products that increase productivity, improve team alignment and connectivity, and allow you to re-focus administrative resources and costs on revenue-generating initiatives.

Trust: Security, Compliance, Privacy, and Reliability

Trust is not just a priority, it’s built into the fabric of our cloud platform. We understand that moving to cloud can feel overwhelming, but unlocking Atlassian Cloud also means benefiting from an enterprise-grade platform that provides your teams with comprehensive data protection, centralized visibility and control, and resilience at scale. But don’t just take our word for it, visit our Trust Center to unpack the details and see the full list of our attestations.

1. We're concerned about potential downtimes on cloud. How are they mitigated? Our Atlassian cloud products are powered by the Atlassian Platform. Built on top of enterprise-grade infrastructure, redundancy and failover capabilities ensure that our systems are highly available and able to withstand failure. Through additional controls, capabilities, and extensive outage simulation testing, we can guarantee specific uptime requirements across multiple plans. In the event of an outage, we’ve built a disaster recovery program and customer backup controls that allows teams to recover quickly without data loss.
   
   

2. What security programs are in place for Marketplace apps? Marketplace partners are responsible for building and managing their own apps. Many partners have detailed documentation on their app's trust posture which customers can find on the Marketplace listing, partner site, or by reaching out to the partner directly. With that said, all Marketplace Partners must meet Atlassian’s Marketplace Cloud Security Requirements and are subject to regular scans and our Marketplace Security Bug Fix Policy.

   Additionally, Marketplace Partners can also participate in opt-in programs, like our Marketplace Bug Bounty program, which allows Marketplace Partners to pay friendly hackers to find vulnerabilities in their apps. We also signify apps that have made additional investments in security, reliability, and support with our Cloud Fortified program and badge.
   
   

3. How does data residency apply to externally-hosted Marketplace apps? The majority of cloud apps on the Atlassian Marketplace have the option to pin data to meet data residency requirements in the US, EU, Australia, and Germany. Some apps support these regions, others do not. Some apps do not independently support data residency because they don’t store any data, or only store data in the corresponding Atlassian product (Jira or Confluence). Data residency offerings will vary by app, and we cannot guarantee that apps will offer data residency for the same data scope or regions as Atlassian products. We are working on making it easier to find app data residency information, but in the meantime we recommend reviewing an app’s documentation or reaching out to the app vendor to see if an app offers data residency.
   
   

4. How are data privacy and data compliance built into your enterprise-grade platform? Atlassian’s cloud not only meets global, regional and national compliance regulations, we meet advanced industry specific needs with support for HIPAA, EBA, and BAFIN. Our data residency solutions support the majority of regions, and we’re moving to the next stage by unlocking support for specific countries with Germany (Shipped), Japan, Canada, and the UK coming later this year, while also providing support for the apps you heavily rely on with data residency support for Connect apps. Visit the Compliance Resource Center to learn more.
   
   

5. Are cloud migration trials HIPAA compliant? No. We currently only offer HIPAA compliance for our enterprise licenses and cloud migration trials are not part of that program.
   
   

6. Do you offer bring your own key (BYOK) on cloud? We are weeks away from launching our BYOK early access program for Jira issues. Follow along on our roadmap to get the latest!
   
   

Data Center

We’re aware that Data Center is still mission-critical for many of our customers and remain committed to continued support for all Atlassian customer journeys; whether you’re currently in the process of a Cloud migration or choose to remain self-managed for the foreseeable future. Data Center is our purpose built enterprise offering for those organizations that must remain self-managed. To learn more about Data Center we recommend you visit the Data Center website and join the Data Center Community. If you would like to see upcoming investments to Data Center products check out the Data Center Roadmap.

1. Cloud doesn’t currently meet our business needs. What are my options? What resources are available? Who can I reach out to? First and foremost, we encourage you to review our website and our roadmap to double check whether your needs are met in cloud today or in the near future. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of years building enterprise-grade reliability, data protection, and administration capabilities into our cloud products and, as a result, they meet the needs of many of our customers today. We’re also continuing to invest in our cloud products, so if you need a particular feature or capability, it may be coming soon. If that’s the case, we recommend you begin planning your cloud migration, since they can take on average 9+ months to complete. If your organization needs a capability in Cloud that is not available or coming soon, Data Center is a viable option for you in the meantime. Data Center provides deployment flexibility and infrastructure options, to learn more about how you can upgrade to Data Center check out our Data Center upgrade guide. For more personalized advice, reach out to us directly to discuss cloud readiness and your migration options.
   
   

2. What does the Data Center upgrade process look like? How long does it take? You have a variety of choices for a Data Center upgrade.

   1. If you want to remain on-premise, you can upgrade using your choice of:

      1. a single-node deployment on your current Server infrastructure

      2. a clustered environment for high availability.

   2. If you want to virtualize your environment you can deploy to a cloud provider of your choice, such as AWS, Amazon, or GCP.

   Note that if you choose a clustered environment, we recommend taking advantage of our Kubernetes support and Helm Charts to assist your deployment. To learn more about your infrastructure options go here and to learn more about the upgrade process go here.
   
   

3. What is Atlassian’s plan for Data Center? Will it be sunset? Data Center remains a core component of Atlassian’s offerings for our enterprise customers today and into the future. We have no plans to end support for our Data Center offering. While we’ll continue to support the breadth of currently available features and capabilities, we are continuing to build a future vision of Data Center to meet customers' most critical needs per feedback and insight. Looking ahead, the Data Center teams are focusing investment on the following four core areas to help organizations succeed at scale:

   1. Improved product experience

   2. Strengthened security and compliance

   3. Enhanced performance and scale

   4. Flexible infrastructure and operations
      
      

4. What is the difference between Server and Data Center? Atlassian Data Center products are the enterprise-grade offerings of our Server products with flexible architecture and deployment methods. Data Center supports both non-clustered and clustered architecture (high availability) along with the ability to deploy virtually in a cloud provider of your choice. On top of this, Data Center products have a significant amount of features that are only available on Data Center such as advanced auditing, zero downtime and rolling upgrades, rate limiting, and more. To learn more about Data Center go here, and to find specific feature differences between Server and Data Center products go to:

   • Jira

   • Confluence

   • Bitbucket

   • Bamboo

   • Crowd
     
     

5. Why is Data Center more expensive than Server? Data Center is our self-managed enterprise edition, whereas Server is our on-premise version. The price difference between Server and Data Center reflects the large number of enterprise capabilities that are available on Data Center that are not available on Server. This includes flexible infrastructure choices and platform features such as advanced auditing, zero downtime and rolling upgrades, rate limiting and more. Additionally, there are a variety of product-level features that can only be found in Data Center. To learn more about the specific Server versus Data Center differences reference below:

   • Jira

   • Confluence

   • Bitbucket

   • Bamboo

   • Crowd
     
     

6. What is the minimum seat requirement for Data Center? We begin our Data Center license tiers at 500 users to best support enterprise organizations. For organizations below the 500 user tier, we recommend considering a cloud migration.
   
   

7. How well does it work to mix and match on-premise Data Center and Cloud? For example, Jira and Confluence in the Cloud, and Bitbucket on-premise. For those looking to make a gradual transition to cloud, we have a solution to help keep your self-managed products connected to your cloud ones while you make the move: app tunnels. These create a secure pathway between your Atlassian Cloud organization and your Data Center instances, allowing you to exchange data and functionalities between them, without exposing your network or allowlisting any incoming connections or IPs. We’ve also invested in creating more robust product integrations between certain cloud and self-managed products that build on top of those secure connections. For example, we have an integration between Bitbucket Data Center and JSW Cloud that allows you to see real-time development status updates within Jira issues, interact with Jira issues in Bitbucket, and more. And we have similar integrations between our Data Center and our Cloud products, which you can learn about on our roadmap.

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Resources provided in the webinar:

• Cloud Migration Trial

• Calculate your costs

• Limited time offers 

• Atlassian Trust Center

• Atlassian Access

[Dave Mathijs]

Wow @Jess Seitz , that's one comprehensive post! Thanks for consolidating the top Q&A.

[LarryBrock]

Hi @Jess Seitz - you might consider elaborating a bit on Data Center minimum seat requirements, including differentiating between the different Jira applications.  For instance, the minimum Jira Service Management license is 50 agents and Bitbucket starts at 25 users.

[Jess Seitz]

Hi @LarryBrock , that’s a great point. You’re correct, the variation in end-user needs from product to product means that the minimum seat requirements also vary:

• 500 users for Jira Software, Confluence, and Crowd Data
• 50 agents for Jira Service Management
• 25 users for Bitbucket
• 1 remote agent for Bamboo

[Mark Rekveld - Marvelution]

Thanks for the detailed post!