Frequently Asked Questions: Data Center Migrations and Deployments
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For many organizations, using a secure cloud solution, such as Atlassian Cloud, allows admins to take advantage of benefits such as streamlined administration and quicker time to value. However, not every customer is ready to migrate to cloud and some have regulatory restrictions that require a self-managed solution. If you’re an admin who needs to maintain control of your data and looking to leverage enterprise features, Data Center is a great next step in your Atlassian journey.
Following our announcement detailing upcoming changes to our server products, we know you that you may have questions about Data Center. We understand that this is a time to consider all of your options and make an informed decision about your Atlassian products moving forward. Data Center experts are here to answer your questions and provide you with the information you need. Ask your questions in the comment section below and we will answer then in our upcoming Q&A style webinar, Ask the Experts: Everything You Need to Know About Data Center.
If you haven’t had a chance to review all of your options, we have a great resource to walk you through the migration process with step-by-step guides and comprehensive tools.
What are the advantages of moving to Data Center?
If you’re an admin managing complexity at scale, Data Center, our self-managed enterprise edition, can help you meet your organization's demands. Data Center supports your teams with best-in-class features and capabilities including:
- Scale, performance and availability
Data Center is designed to support your teams at scale. As an enterprise platform, Data Center products offer scalability with capabilities built to maximize performance and availability as your organization grows. With the ability to deploy your applications in a cluster, and additional features such as rate limiting and cluster monitoring, you no longer have to fear downtime or performance degradation.
- Advanced User Management
With Data Center products, your team has access to the tools they need when they need them. Our advanced user management capabilities allow admins to manage user-related activities and easily achieve simple and secure authorization, flexible authentication, and automated user provisioning.
Data Center supports leading protocols, SAML and OIDC. This provides your teams with the flexibility to authenticate with different IdPs and you the ability to achieve seamless authentication across the organization.
Automated user provisioning is necessary as your organization grows and scales. Data Center helps streamline this process by giving you, the admin, the power to manage user identities via a centralize view of each team member. You can also enable just in time (JIT) provisioning which automatically creates an account when a new user authenticates into an application for the first time.
- Infrastructure and operations
As you scale, you need the technical flexibility to meet your evolving business needs. Data Center supports your organization’s demands by allowing you to leverage either a clustered or non-clustered architecture and deploy on the infrastructure of your choice. Additionally, you can host your products in a modern infrastructure with cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. These IaaS options give you access to advanced tools that accelerate automation and efficiency. By building out a lasting framework, you can meet current organizational needs as well as plan for future considerations as your enterprise grows.
Learn more about your Data Center deployment and hosting options below.
- Data and insights
Advanced auditing for Data Center, released earlier this year, gives self-managed enterprises the visibility and insight needed to improve security and streamline workflows. To enhance data visibility, advanced auditing makes it quick and easy for you to garner insight into your Data Center instances and make informed decisions to mitigate risk.
With advanced auditing, you have access to event logs that track specific activity within your instance. You can then integrate your monitoring tools for long-term storage through file externalization. Additionally, exciting features within your monitoring tools allow you to track trends and glean even more insight into your products. With the enhanced UI and improved tracking, you can easily visualize information and understand how products are being used across the organization.
- Security and compliance
Maintaining a secure environment is top-of-mind as you scale your team and build out workflow processes. For organizations looking to improve security and compliance, Data Center offers features and capabilities to support your demands. Whether you are looking to adapt to an ever-evolving regulatory landscape or prevent security incidents, Data Center allows you to access your mission-critical applications while better safeguarding your people and data.
More on our security and compliance features below.
- Apps and extensibility
Data Center apps give you the ability to customize your Atlassian products at scale. Our Data Center approved apps are rigorously tested to ensure that they can support modernized, clustered environments and handle increased usage. Integrations and add-ons allow your team to streamline workflows and meet organizational needs as you scale. Get more done, faster with analytics, automation and more - all built to drive efficiency across your organization.
100% of the top 100 Server apps have a Data Center equivalent, meaning that you can continue to use your apps on a platform that can support the needs of your growing team.
View the Data Center Roadmap to see the platform investments we are actively making.
What are my deployment options with Data Center?
Every organization is different, which is why Data Center is built to support your unique needs with flexible deployment options.
You can deploy in either a non-cluster or clustered architecture. If you don’t need high availability, a non-clustered architecture gives you immediate access to most of Data Center’s features without the need to set up a new infrastructure. By starting with a non-clustered architecture, you can grow into your instance with the option to enable clustering if your organization’s objectives and demands evolve.
In contrast, teams that need high availability can choose to deploy in a clustered architecture. Doing so allows you to unlock Data Center features that require high availability such as Disaster Recovery, zero downtime upgrades for Jira Software, and bug fix ZDU (coming soon for Bitbucket and Confluence).
What hosting options are available for Data Center products?
With Data Center, you can choose the hosting option that best supports your team. If you’re happy with your existing infrastructure and want to deploy in a non-clustered architecture, you can continue to run Data Center on your own hardware. While clustered environments require some additional infrastructure updates, you can choose to run them on your existing hardware or upgrade as needed. Teams that want added automation can also take advantage of cloud computing. If you're just beginning your journey to the cloud, Atlassian supports leading IaaS vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, giving your team the ability to save time and modernize, while scaling as needed.
I work within a regulated industry. If I migrate to Data Center, will I maintain the same control over my data as I have in server?
Yes. Data Center offers robust security and compliance features to ensure that you can maintain control of your data without compromising enterprise performance.
Self-managed enterprises, especially those operating in highly regulated industries, must prioritize security and compliance as they evolve. While managing security at scale can be a challenge due to ever-changing regulatory requirements, Atlassian Data Center gives you the confidence that your products are safe. Here are a few Data Center features to safeguard your teams and further support your security needs:
- Rest assured with self-protection:
As your enterprise scales, protecting your mission-critical applications becomes increasingly important. Data Center’s rate limiting feature allows you to monitor and control the rate of incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic, making your instance more safe and secure. Organizational growth often means an increase in REST API requests which can lead to a security incident or breach. Threats such as poorly written scripts that pull API too frequently can cause a flood of traffic leaving your instance vulnerable. With self-protection capabilities, you have added visibility into who is being rate limited, how often requests are being limited, and the last time they were limited. These insights help to prevent performance degradation and safeguard your instance from potential threats.
- Instance monitoring and reporting capabilities:
In the event of a security breach, time is of the essence. By documenting security patterns and site access, you can act quickly and manage complex systems with confidence. Advanced auditing in Data Center provides a digital record of your organizations activity to demonstrate compliance, improve security, and better manage risk and workflow. Increased audit coverage including security events, global permissions, and local configurations, allow you to track and monitor security threats in real time. This means that you can react fast and maintain a safe and secure environment.
How do I plan a Data Center migration?
No two organizations are the same and neither is your migration journey. To get started, you must identify your businesses needs and chose the migration path best suited for your organization. A critical first step is to understand Data Center’s architecture and whether you should leverage a clustered or non-clustered architecture. While each deployment option requires different considerations, they both deliver enterprise-grade features and capabilities to meet your organization’s unique needs. Additionally, you will want to evaluate your hosting options and consider any hardware updates you’ll need to make as well as whether or not you’d like to leverage a cloud vendor such as AWS or Azure.
Once you’ve chosen the options that will best support your teams, you are ready to begin planning your move to Data Center.
For more on planning your migration, view our Data Center Migration Guide.
Stay tuned for product-specific migration tips coming soon.
How do I build a business case for Data Center?
To build a business case for Data Center you will want to calculate your total cost of ownership and return on investment (ROI). Once you’ve taken these steps, make sure to check out the Data Center Business Case Toolkit. These product-specific toolkits have everything you need to communicate the value of Atlassian Data Center and are a great resource to build a winning use case. With assets such as email templates and PDFs, our toolkits are designed to share with stakeholders and educate your team.
What is the time commitment for a migration?
While every migration is different, the great thing about Data Center is that it offers flexibility to migrate your way. Before building your unique timeline, you must assemble the right project team and evaluate your organization demands and goals. Factors that will affect your timeline include the architecture you plan to deploy your Data Center products on as well as the hosting option you choose (including hardware changes and leveraging cloud vendors).
Here are the basic timelines that you can use to gauge how long your migration should take. These are estimates from our customers and your actual timelines may vary based on your business needs.
Check out our migration guide for more information on building your migration timeline.
Is migration support available?
As you evaluate your migration options, the Atlassian team wants to assist you in any way that we can.
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Need help migrating? We’ve got your back. |
Want expert guidance? Work with a channel or solutions partner. |
Looking for peer advice? Start here for help. |
Our Data Center Migration Center offers resources and additional services that you can lean on throughout the process. From blogs and whitepapers that outline the difference between deployment options, to step-by-step migration guides, we can help you plan your migration end-to-end.
If you have additional questions or comments about Data Center, leave them below and we will answer them in our dedicated webinar on November 11. We look forward to seeing you there!
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