On Cloud versus On Premise in Financial Services

[P Merrill]

I work in financial services and at this point we are using an on-premise version of JIRA and Confluence. However, those two products are somewhat hampered by the lack of plugins for things like reporting. There are many plugins available for the cloud version but not many for the on-premise version.

So, my question is, for financial services companies are there many of them using JIRA in the cloud and thus able to access these great plugins, or, due to security concerns, are most of the big banks and financial services companies sticking with the on-premise version and perhaps looking for better JIRA/Confluence replacement tools for future use?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Most of the banks I work with are staying with Data Center.  There's zero drive to move to other tools.  If anything, there's actually a huge demand to dump other tools and move to Jira!  Every piece of work my team has with a bank is either a move to Jira Cloud or a move from rally, salesforce, or, or, or, on to Jira DC.

[P Merrill]

Nic,

So if you're using Data Centre, as I understand, that's a where JIRA is actually running on Atlassian servers and they have configured it to be highly responsive, etc. The "data" in JIRA in regards to your projects is then sitting somewhere where Atlassian has servers, so in Australia, in the US, the EU, etc. I understand you have a choice where the data is stored.

In our case right now, our JIRA data is sitting on our servers inside the bank, so no one can see the data, not even Atlassian. We were given a version of software to install on our servers and periodically we need to upgrade the software to a "newer" version when it becomes available. The current situation is that in most cases, there are very few plugins that we can install. For example, there is an Excel plugin that one can use to pull data from JIRA into Excel (it's free from Atlassian). We cannot use it because it does not run on our "private" version of JIRA.

My main question was, how many financial services companies out there use private instances of JIRA and Confluence, like we do? I suspect very few.

My reason for collecting the information is that I believe we probably should be on a Data Center instance, and "join" the 21st century, rather than forgo all the "good" plugins available. I feel currently our productivity is lower because we're stuck with building manual status reports, manual risk registers (in our current JIRA you can't raise risks in JIRA because it's been turned off, you need to raise them in another system). If we had it all in JIRA there would be no double handling and everyone could see everything in "real-time".

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Nope, that's wrong.

If you are on Data Centre, then you are using the software running on your servers, not Atlassian ones.  Same with Jira Server.

Only Cloud systems are running on Atlassian servers.

Most financial services are running "private" servers, many of them for historical reasons, but also that Atlassian Cloud cannot support their needs - it still does not fully support their regulatory needs and the customisations they can do on serve/DC installations cannot be done on Cloud (most of then are done by apps)

If you're stuck building manual status reports and risk registers, then there's something wrong with your internal processes and procedures.  Server, DC and Cloud Jiras can all do that sort of thing, it's up to your admins to enable it.

[P Merrill]

Thanks, good to know. One question about DC, do you know if you can you the excel plugin to pull data from JIRA? I think I downloaded but it indicated that it would not run.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You haven't said which "excel plugin" you are thinking of, but the likely answer is "yes".  If the app has a Server or DC version, then you can install it on a Server or DC system.  If it only has a Cloud version, then you'll only be able to install it on a Cloud system.