The journey to Atlassian Cloud with Adaptavist: Our playbook to cloud migration success

The first stage in this journey begins long before you actually migrate your instances over to the cloud. It’s all about asking big questions like ‘Why are we looking to move to Atlassian Cloud?’, ‘What other options are there?’, and ‘Do we need to engage an Atlassian Solution Partner?’

By taking the time to figure out the answers, you’ll be well prepared for what lies ahead as you will have:

• Clarified the motivations, and therefore the goals, of your migration.
• Carefully considered other options and confirmed that Atlassian Cloud is the right solution for your organisation.
• Assessed your expertise internally and explored the benefits of leaning on external partners for support.

Trigger

When you think about migration, what are the top reasons triggering your decision-making? Perhaps the pandemic forced your business to shift to a cloud-first approach across all your tools, with SaaS adoption speeding up as a result. Maybe technical experts left, forcing you to lean on cloud services and their support? Or perhaps a merger or acquisition has forced you to reflect on your on-prem provision or consider consolidating your instances.

Here are some other common triggers:

Scalability – growth is on the cards, and you want tech that can handle it. You’re going to need more computing power, server space, and resources to meet sudden spikes in users or sales, and slow, expensive on-site systems just don’t cut it.

Flexibility – growth isn’t one straight arrow pointing up. Increasing power and space when you need it, but not paying for it when you don’t, is essential for agile businesses to succeed.

Affordability – you’re not put off by subscription costs. You know that cloud vendors take care of all the details and provide support, so your IT team is free to focus on more strategic tasks.

Continuity – you want to put an end to conflicting files and endless email attachments. With cloud computing, everything is stored in one place and can be accessed by everyone at the same time. This is ideal for remote workforces, and supports and encourages a more collaborative culture, greater visibility, and faster turnaround.

Security – you don’t want to worry about security and compliance. With cloud services, rigorous security testing, encryption, and disaster recovery plans are part of the package, giving you peace of mind.

Explore

Now you know why you want to migrate, it’s important to assess what other options are available to make sure Atlassian Cloud is the right choice for you. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. What’s right for one company could be the wrong fit for another. There are different organisation-specific variables to consider, including your add-on apps and customisations, and what security standards you need to uphold. If you are looking to move from Atlassian Server, there are a couple of other options available to you:

• Migrate to Atlassian Data Center
• A hybrid approach

It’s time to get organised! At this point you’ll be focusing on the details, planning, and preparing for migration to take place. First, to set your migration on the path to success, you need to define what that looks like. During this stage, all parties should be on the same page with the migration strategy, including what compromises and changes have been agreed upon in order for your goals to be reached.

Agree on goals

Atlassian Cloud migration is so much more than installing a set of technologies – it’s a way to align your technology with your long-term business goals. For example, if your move to the Cloud is driven by cost, your plan will look different to a business that’s focused on reducing risk or improving customer experience. It’s also important to document your overall migration objective as this gives everyone visibility and helps individual teams understand where their deliverables fit into the bigger picture.

Plan to succeed

A detailed Cloud migration plan will outline all the essential components of the process to ensure everything runs smoothly and you reach your goals. Here are a few key planning points to put you on the path to success:

• Cost – Make sure you have a clear idea of what it currently costs to run your workload and how that will change when you move to Cloud. Look at the business holistically to account for all the current costs and future operational spend. This is a good opportunity to review your workflows and find ways to maximise efficiencies and eliminate waste.
• Infrastructure – Analyse your structural requirements and needs to guarantee Atlassian Cloud will be compatible. Have a preliminary understanding of your infrastructure’s, applications’, and operations’ dependencies so you know what you’re going to need from your new cloud home. This process will also help establish clarity about the value and functionality that may need to be delivered via third-party apps.
• Approach – Once you’ve got a good idea of what needs to be moved, and any other risks or concerns, you can then figure out which migration strategy is right for your organisation and start building a realistic timeline to take these decisions into consideration.
• Timeline – Lastly, set an estimated timeline for migration, with everyone’s commitment and the various stages built in. Bring all key stakeholders along, so that each team understands its responsibility and agrees to the deadlines.

With the checklist complete, you’re ready to test out your instance. We recommend a test migration, whatever your instance’s complexity or user numbers. It’s the best way to uncover issues, learn how long your actual migration will take, and help you organise a realistic and detailed migration runbook.

The three main tasks you’ll need to complete are backup, testing, and creating a runbook. So let’s take a look at all three:

Backup

We can’t stress this enough – back up your self-hosted instance before migration. And if you have any cloud-site data already, back this up as well. With Jira, you can use native database backup tools or Jira’s XML backup utility. But with Confluence you’ll need to set a clear strategy and a tool of your choice to back up your database, install directory, and home directory.

Testing

After conducting development and staging tests, you’ll need to undergo rigorous user acceptance testing (UAT). This lets your users recreate everyday tasks to make sure your Cloud instance will work the way they need it to. Most importantly, it will bring issues to light that you can address before migration. You’ll need a good range of users from different teams and roles to conduct testing, including those who use your instance less frequently.

Feedback should cover links to other content; customisations, automations and other functionality being delivered by third-party apps; and integrations with other products. For Jira, they should be checking workflows, especially functions that rely on third-party apps, creating new projects, and creating and editing issues. While in Confluence, they might need to test attachments are all in place and that any associated apps and data work correctly too.

Testing is useless without effective documentation and constructive feedback, so make sure your testers are informed about what to look out for and how to keep track. And if anything’s changed, such as user interface and administration, features or bookmarks, they should take screenshots so you can communicate these changes to everyone else before and after migration.

Runbook

This is when you create a step-by-step checklist and more concrete timeline. This should clarify what is going to happen and when, include supporting instructions, as well as naming the owner for each task. Don’t forget to incorporate a mitigation plan for what will happen if migration needs to be rolled back.

Begin your migration

Now your migration activities are ready to begin. It goes without saying that the more complex your architecture, the more careful you need to be. Best practice is starting the process by migrating the least complex applications first, leaving any mission-critical applications for later in the cycle to help minimise downtime.

Run your production migration, and move everything – users and data – over to the cloud. Each migration is unique, but at this point your users might not need to access your self-managed instance. To avoid confusion, it’s best to set your sites to read-only mode before migration. And update your site-wide banners so everyone knows the score.

Follow your runbook step by step, and stick to the times you set to migrate your data. Atlassian provides ample documentation about how to use its Cloud Migration Assistants, or you’ll be supported throughout this phase by an Atlassian Solution Partner. Then, migrate any critical apps as you’ve planned.

Once everything has migrated, it’s time to resolve any production issues, checking that your data has moved over as expected and that, as far as you can tell, there are no new risks or issues of concern. If your testing has been thorough and effective, there shouldn’t be any nasty surprises at this stage. And if anything does crop up, you have a rollback plan in place to mitigate any disruption to your users.

Congratulations! Once you make it to this stage you can celebrate successfully migrating to Atlassian Cloud. But while it’s tempting to put your feet up and take a break, there’s a little bit of work left to do to make sure your users are set up for success, too. Taking the time to welcome everyone, put adequate support in place, and learn from any issues that arise will allow your users to be more productive more quickly and make all that hard work worth it.

A warm welcome

Moving to Atlassian Cloud is a big change, and it deserves a big announcement. Let all your stakeholders know that migration has been completed successfully. Remind them about why the decision was made – the big benefits Atlassian Cloud will bring – and include any top-level changes they should look out for.

Get up and running

Send out an email inviting all your users to the new Cloud site (or invite them from the Cloud site directly), so they can start being productive and reaping the benefits. It’s a good idea to include key information in your initial communications, such as directions on how to log in, any passwords or other information people might need to reset, important app changes, and who to get in touch with if they need any support. Remember, some users might feel overwhelmed or concerned about the change, so be sure to mention any training you’re planning to provide.

Resolving issues

However meticulously you planned, there are going to be issues that crop up post-migration. That’s okay. Set aside a few time slots in the first two weeks after migration to address these issues, provide feedback, and answer any questions your users have. It’s also a good idea to set up a Slack channel or similar, for users to ask their questions and to collate useful information.

Ongoing support and maintenance

If you’re not going to use your self-managed instance any more, now is the time to back-up your data, if you haven’t already, and to let your maintenance expire. With the initial post-migration phase complete, you can transition to providing standard support and maintenance for your SaaS applications, enabling your users to get the most out of the new solution.

Unlike when your instance/s were on Server or Data Center, your admins are no longer responsible for manual upkeep. So if you need any help keeping your site running as expected, you can reach out to Atlassian directly. That means your team will be freed up to focus on more strategic work and deliver more value to the business.

Your admins will need to follow best practice when it comes to governance and security protocols, and be informed with how Atlassian keeps data secure. They should also stay up to date with any upcoming changes to the Atlassian Cloud platform and its products.