Cloud infrastructures are increasingly becoming the de facto standard, with Atlassian Cloud leading the way. Gartner estimates that 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies use at least one Atlassian Cloud product.
Whether you’re looking to expand your current Atlassian infrastructure to the Cloud or you’re new to Atlassian altogether, planning and prepping for your migration is key to a smooth execution.
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12 Tips for a Seamless Migration
The following sections outline our top 12 tips to ensure you have a smooth, successful migration to Atlassian Cloud. For a more detailed discussion of each of these tips, check out the full ebook.
1. Plan in Detail
Create a detailed plan with realistic timeframes for each step, from initial assessment to production rollout. Make time to incorporate requirements from your cyber security or compliance teams and give yourself plenty of time during testing to discover and remediate any issues prior to your production migration.
2. Estimate Your ROI
Comparing a return on investment (ROI) with your current costs can help your migration gain endorsement and keep you on budget. One of the biggest areas of cost saving from cloud comes in the time your teams devote to patching and upgrading software, documenting changes and notifying the people affected.
3. Know Your Starting Point
Create a complete list of your current instances and their functionalities to determine which ones you want to migrate. Remember to take stock of the number of licenced users and end users/ customers. This could be an opportunity to clean up redundant or duplicate accounts so you can right-size your licence and plan for the future without overprovisioning.
4. Review Your Functional Requirements
List all the features and apps your team uses and check if they are available in the Cloud version. If not, find an Atlassian alternative that satisfies your business case, and check out the Atlassian Marketplace for helpful third-party integrations.
5. Don’t Forget the Non-Functional
Consider which Atlassian Cloud plan best meets your organization’s non-functional requirements. You might consider availability, support hours, compliance, and single sign-on (SSO) functionalities. Consider taking this opportunity to redesign things like forms, access rights, dashboards and other aspects that affect productivity and user engagement.
6. Don’t Underestimate Atlassian Access
Atlassian Access is a must for enabling SSO in your Atlassian Cloud environment. It connects your identity access management (IAM) system for verification and provisioning and has an advanced audit log for any audit/debugging requirements.
7. Find the Right Path for Your Migration
Once you know what to migrate, you can define how to reach your goals. Double check your decisions and be sure that you capitalize on the opportunity to streamline data, workloads, workflows and archive data so that you don’t take with you anything that would be better off without. Check out the decision tree in the full e-book to learn more about finding the right migration pathway.
8. Clean Up Before Moving to the Cloud
Remove or consolidate any outdated projects, workflows, or users to accelerate migration and improve performance. Leave plenty of time for this and create an archiving strategy or policy that governs what you keep, what you take and how you record or archive old data whilst still making it accessible as needed.
9. Use Trials
Take advantage of Atlassian’s trial capabilities to run trials up to migration. If you’re migrating from Atlassian Server or Data Center, you can claim a free, extended trial for the remainder of your current Atlassian subscription. This helps you to assess and avoid risks from your migration strategy before implementation.
10. Update Your Governance
Ensure you have appropriate governance in place to provide a better quality of service to your end users. You’ll likely benefit from assigning roles based on the responsibilities outlined in your governance documentation. These roles and responsibilities will likely include:
- A governance sponsor to fund the projects
- Change managers to oversee all aspects of IT changes
- Change reviewers to authorize or approve changes
- Engineers/developers to deploy and monitor changes
- An incident response team to address sudden or unexpected issues
Additionally, list all the rules to ensure your instances are healthy, and make these rules available to all your end users.
11. Communicate Internally
Provide your users advance notice of your plan to migrate to Atlassian Cloud. To make the transition easier, consider creating “before and after” documentation to illustrate the changes to expect. If there are any changes to the process, or if users will need to re-authenticate on the new system before continuing as usual, spell out the steps really clearly to avoid an influx of calls around the time of migration.
12. Rely on External Support
Inform Atlassian Support at least two weeks before your migration date, so they’re ready in case you need them. Or for some extra assurance, contact Valiantys and let us intermediate with any app vendors that may be involved.
Conclusion
With the proper guidance, migrating to Atlassian Cloud can be a seamless process. Our experts at Valiantys have years of experience helping businesses of all sizes transition to the Atlassian Cloud smoothly, measure their return on investment and ensure that they capitalize on the enhanced capabilities available on Cloud.
Make the move to Atlassian Cloud as easy as possible with help from Valiantys.
