How To Successfully Migrate to Jira Cloud in Phases

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Are you considering migrating to Jira Cloud, but doing it in one go seems daunting? In this article you’ll learn how to use a phased migration strategy instead of big-bang to avoid data losses and ease your way onto the new platform.

Why Choose Phased Migration?

Migrating in phases allows you to migrate your instance in segments, which enables you to:

1. Access your current Jira Server / Data Center instance while moving to the Cloud.
2. Gather iterative feedback during the migration.
3. Clean and optimize your projects and Jira instance.
4. Take all the time you need for onboarding your users in each phase.

Here’s the thing: there’s always an option to keep the server project while you migrate to Jira Cloud, but it comes at a cost! The users might get confused if they stumble upon the outdated information without realizing it and mistakenly start using the old data. Alternatively, you could delete the old server project but would run the risk of losing valuable information and access to Jira issues that the users required but cannot access anymore.

Get the Most Out of Cross-Deployment

To get the most value out of your phased migration and get around the issues mentioned above we recommend to:

• Keep the server projects to make existing issues easily discoverable and have a backup.
• Make the issues on the server uneditable so no one can update them.
• Place a banner on the issues and projects on the old server instance to further reduce the chances of a mistake.

Using Backbone Issue Sync you can keep the server issues up-to-date with the information from the cloud issues and also have links between the two to easily navigate from your Jira Server issue to the corresponding Cloud issue and vice versa.

If this caught your interest and you want a detailed explanation with more guidance and instructions, check out the blog post here.