Stand Alone Service Desk on Cloud initially then integrate with Jira

[Eric Holman]

We need to migrate off our current incident management tool in a couple of month. We want to move to Service Management on the cloud.  We don't need to migrate any history, so it's a clean install. We running Jira suite on prem right now and will be migrating that to the cloud later in the year. If we stand up service desk on the cloud as a stand alone and then migrate the existing suite to the cloud at a later date will we run into any challenges that we need to consider?

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

If you think you will want to link JSM issues to JSW issues, I would recommend you migrate everything in to the same site (use only one URL.) Currently the linking between sites (Atlassian calls this "federation") requires a 3rd party App.

You would need to use JCMA to migrate your JSW Projects if you go with the approach you are proposing. It has the capability to migrate some App data, which will make that part of the project easier.  Currently, the user and group merge capabilities have some limitations, as do the field merge capabilities. This is continually improving, so it may not be an issue when you do this later in the year.  

My advice would be to get your users cleaned up and in Cloud now.  Do that first, before you do anything else.  Set up Access and get it linked to your IDP.  You then have a fixed target that you will normalize the users in your JSW instance against.  To the extent possible, I would advise instituting a change moratorium on your JSW instance to make life easier.  Don't add a bunch of new Apps, Fields, etc because that will add to your complexity.  Any cleanup, removal of Apps, etc that you can do now will make life easier.  

You aren't proposing anything too unusual and the tooling was designed to handle this use case, so as long as you plan and test effectively, I think you should be fine.