Key reasons we migrated our Self-managed Atlassian JIRA to the cloud

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This is the first of seven articles bringing you through the most important and beneficial experiences we gained in out migration project that concluded May 2020. This first article will focus on what we had and why we decided to migrate our self-managed Jira instance to Jira cloud.

Introducing Digizuite™ DAM

Digizuite is a major player in the global DAM market, providing powerful digital asset management solutions to businesses and organizations around the world.

Our software, Digizuite™, makes it easy to collaborate across departments, countries, and digital channels. Users can simply upload, edit, search, manage, distribute, and repurpose rich media content, such as images, videos, documents, and PDF files, across internal and external channels from one centralized source through automated and intelligent workflows.

Here are our 4 reasons I migrate to Jira Cloud:

• We do not have resources and skillset to monitor and maintain a stable Jira instance on the long term. We want to focus on our core business which is supplying the best DAM solutions with relentless customer focus.
• We were on an old release 7.6 of Jira and had more and more issues that required an upgrade to resolve. Upgrades are expensive and recurring. We looked at Managed service, services but they were also very costly.
• Purchasing users on self-managed happen in bulk and can be a slow process and often you have unused licenses you payed for. We are growing a lot and constantly collaborating with our customers on Jira Projects therefor we want a flexible plan that enables us quickly to expand our license with exactly the users we need.
• Access to the library of plugins enabling us to connect our development with Git

Based on the above benefits we accepted a slightly increased cost for users and the budgeted migration cost for both internal and external resources.

Recommendations for planning the Migration project

1. In our retrospective on the project we were happy that we established this action as a project, with a project manager and steering committee with all internal stakeholders making sure we have roles in place and a clear structure of responsibility and communication. This helped us control a chaotic process with a lot of Changes, Risks and lessons that we are now passing on here.
2. Prepare to spend somewhere from 100-200 hours internally before you are done with this process in test, in migration and post go-live.
3. You need to engage a person that can work with the Jira SQL database and provide exports to Atlassian of the instance for both Test and Production.
4. You need a Jira specialist or partner on board that has a super user level experience to help set up the test instance and perform the configuration needed, This is not provided 100% by Atlassian and you need to be ready to do some work. We have specialists, but all are focused on delivery of our own services, so we had to onboard an external resource for this. We spent approximately 80-100 hours for configuration and technical support in the process before we were done.
5. Please check with your plugin providers if and how you can migrate their data to cloud if you need it. *

* Tempo Timesheets will not migrate (or very expensive service) it has to do with accounts being lost and must be reconfigured.

* Satisfaction data from JSD is lost.

* SLA information from JSD is somewhat restorable but will be changed due to changing SLA’s 

In the next article we will provide the Do’s and don’ts in the migration test process. At the end of the article series we will conclude on if we achieved the benefits listed above.

Budget and calculating your cloud cost

As a part of the project limitations we need to calculate an estimated budget and get it approved by the project sponsor.

Here are the recommendations and experiences

1.  I would recommend you check the specification of what is Cloud Standard and what is Cloud premium. The license price is double. In our case we got caught on Automation from Jira suddenly was transaction based and each comment in the system triggered our automation and we crushed the Standard limit in a couple of days. We had to reconfigure out automations as simple project automation on 60+ projects to not blow the lid off the budget by going premium.
2. Use the Atlassian cloud price calculator. https://www.atlassian.com/software/pricing-calculator
3. You will notice that prices for monthly and annual payment work differently. Annual payment you purchase a right to have e.g. 100-200 users. And monthly you pay per user. It is cheaper to go monthly if you have in the lower part of the span and more expensive if you are closer to the max. We went with monthly and switch plan when we hit 170 Jira software users.

Introduction of the authors

Between the authors in this article series we have more than 40 years in IT and with more than 21 years together working with Atlassian Jira products in several organization.

Introducing Jakob F. Gormsen has been working as an Atlassian Expert the last 16 years specializing in helping organizations get the most out of the Atlassian products, with a special knowledge about Jira Server. You can reach out to Jakob at https://condoctor.dk/.

Henrik has mainly been a Manager and user of Jira to run Development and support. Henrik in this context is the Project Manager of the Migration project and responsible for Support and Quality in Digizuite. The reason we are writing this article series is to pass on our experiences from the process and want to help the Atlassian community get a more successful cloud migration. We have received support from the Atlassian Migrations and communications team to provide you with their initiatives to prevent the issues we experienced in the future.

[Kat]

I look forward to reading about your journey to the cloud @Henrik Lambert . Thanks for sharing this with us.

[Jimmy Seddon]

This was a fantastic read, thanks for sharing @Henrik Lambert!

[Henrik Lambert]

The next article is up. A lot shorter as it only covers test, but has some things we did well and what we would do differently. 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Preparation-is-king-when-migrating-to-Atlassian-Jira-cloud/ba-p/1456644#M1432