Jira Cloud Migration: Handling User License Allocation during Migration

[Scottie Tang]

Hi, new to this community!

We are currently testing the migration process from Jira Server to Jira Cloud. During the migration, we have noticed that there are approximately 2XX users set to be migrated to Jira Cloud. However, our plan only includes 15 licenses, and many of these users are no longer active or have resigned. It appears that the migration process aims to preserve data integrity by migrating all users previously referenced in our projects.

Our intention is to have only 15 active users consuming the licenses on our Jira Cloud site. We would like to seek your guidance on how to handle this situation. Is it possible to migrate these users to the cloud without them consuming any licenses, or is there a recommended approach to ensure that only the active users have licenses assigned?

Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Scottie Tang 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Are the users in your self-hosted Jira managed through an Internal User Directory or through connection to an external user directory like MS Active Directory?

For the users that you don't want to be licensed in Cloud, do they show in your self-hosted Jira as deactivated?

In Jira Cloud are you managing your site users through connection to an IDP, or just generically using Atlassian Cloud user accounts?

As per this document

https://support.atlassian.com/migration/docs/migrate-users-and-groups/

...deactivated users will be migrated to Cloud and added to your site, but they will not be granted access to your product and will not count against your Cloud licenses.

[Charlie Misonne · Accepted solution]

Hi @Scottie Tang welcome to the Atlassian community!

The cloud migration assistant will indeed migrate a lot of users. Depending on your settings it will migrate all users or only users that are linked to the projects in scope of the migration. How Jira users and groups are migrated.

When performing a Cloud migration I usually put the users that will need a license on Cloud in a separate group in advance (if you can).

When you perform the migration Jira will migrate the users and groups but it will not grant access to the users yet. When finished it will ask you to review the groups that had access on the server instance and choose whether to grant them access on the Cloud instance.
Instead you will grant access to the new group you created earlier on server with the 15 users. Of course you can also create the new group on cloud after the migration.
If the current "product access" groups on Cloud are the same as on server they will get access immediately. So make sure the server groups do not provide any product access on cloud yet.