How much will Cloud Shift impact Jira Admin work?

[Monika Rani]

Hi All Community Members,

Today one of my colleagues was discussing the impact of Cloud shift on Jira Admin's work. He was telling that cloud shift will eat the Jira Admin's Job because Jira Admin will not do much except the configuration.

Is it really true. I don't think like that. What do you think? Please share your thoughts with me.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

@Monika Rani 

Well depends on how you see a JIRA admin.

If you are only administering the day to day of the tool itself then not much changes. Of course if you also include the server management and DB management, etc.. yeah that's taken care of by AWS now :)

[Jimmy Seddon]

Personally, when I did the migration from Server to Could at my previous company.  There were trade-offs for every aspect.

I no longer had to worry about testing, communicating and performing upgrades.  But, now I'm checking the Atlassian Cloud Blog for the weekly change updates to see if anything Atlassian has released this week will affect my users.

I'm not digging into the server machine itself to look at the logs are investigate performance issues, but I am more regularly in contact with Atlassian Support (since I don't have direct access to some the errors behind the scenes).  I'm also subscribed to Atlassian's public status page for things that will affect our users so I can give advanced warning of known outages or performance issues.

So I would say you won't be doing the same thing as an admin of Cloud as you were for Server, but I would also disagree that you are simply managing configurations.

Thanks for posting the discussion @Monika Rani! I think this is a great topic to be chatting about!

[Monika Rani]

Thank you @Jimmy Seddon for your views and I also do not agree about the simply managing configuration but my colleagues was saying like this and I had a good brain storming with him. I am happy that all other community members also giving the interesting views.

[Dave Liao]

@Monika Rani - I agree with Jimmy! If moving to cloud means Jira admins have less responsibilities, theoretically this means I have more time to ensure Jira has the right schemes to serve my users! 😊 For sure this means I have more time to get another cup of coffee...

[Daniel Eads]

Prior to joining Atlassian, I was a sysadmin and responsible for 4 different production Jira instances, Confluence, Bitbucket Server, Sharepoint, and a variety of other smaller systems. I'd gotten quite good at quickly and reliably managing the upgrades, as well as the other general upkeep tasks a proactive sysadmin should be handling. But it definitely didn't take so little time that I could easily manage all the other incoming requests.

I also led Atlassian User Groups locally, and talked to many other Atlassian administrators. Except for a couple very large companies, all the administrators I interacted with had "something else" they were doing. Many were agile coaches or scrum masters, some were developers that were tasked with Jira administration by virtue of having some IT background in the past.

This has been something that's weighed on me for a few months. I think some people will likely need to change their skillset a bit - some tasks are going to go away, and if Jira Server alone was a full time job, it probably won't be in Cloud. However, the largest of large organizations might be using Jira Data Center instead, and that actually somewhat increases the responsibility of people in that role at that organization. Or if someone doesn't want to learn new skills, it's possible they could get a job at an Atlassian Partner who's contracting Data Center administration for large companies.

But for many administrators in an increasingly SaaS-oriented world where companies use best-of-breed tools, this will free up time to do other work that's been sitting on the back burner. Maybe it's time to finally get a solid 2-factor authentication policy in place. Or projects to get reporting data flowing between systems / BI tools. Or automating work for teams (onboarding/offboarding scripts!) that haven't been able to invest that time before. My hunch is that a SaaS-friendly administrator will have lots of work to do connecting all their SaaS services together and making sure each tool is delivering everything their company needs.