Five compelling reasons to migrate to Atlassian Cloud

Last October, Atlassian’s CEO Scott Farquhar announced that Atlassian Server was reaching end-of-life (EOL) and customers have two options: either migrate to Atlassian’s own public cloud solution or move to Atlassian Data Center.

To ensure customers have plenty of time to consider these options, Atlassian is taking a phased approach. Since February 2021, organizations are no longer able to buy new Server licenses. However, they can still upgrade or downgrade their Server products until February 2022, and they can renew and receive maintenance and support for their licenses until February 2024. In practical terms this means that most customers with large data migrations will need to migrate to either Atlassian Cloud or Atlassian Data Center by Summer 2023.

Atlassian Cloud Versus Atlassian Data Center

While there is no need for immediate action, Atlassian Server customers should certainly be considering their options and starting to plan their migration.

Below are what we consider to be the five compelling advantages for moving data to the cloud. But before we delve into these, we first wanted to clarify what the main differences are between the two.

Essentially this comes down to which commercial model appeals most and of course the technology, compliance and security requirements of the organization. With Atlassian Data Center, organizations have control over where to host the tools and who looks after them. Atlassian Data Center uses multiple-node clusters to manage enterprise-level workloads which means that it delivers great latency, performance and uptime, which might be more suitable for some environments. Where an on-premise or private cloud solution is required, e.g. for regulatory compliance or additional security reasons, Data Center is the answer. If there are no compelling reasons for more control over your environment, Atlassian Cloud might be the better option.

The Advantages of Atlassian Cloud

Although some of the advantages outlined below may not be applicable to all organizations due to a number of different factors, there are many gains of Atlassian Cloud and here are the five key benefits:

1. Time to market 

Organizations can get going quickly. Fast deployment means teams can start working on projects immediately. With hefty backlogs of software development projects building up, this is appealing. Likewise, ROI is also important; Dell reports that organizations that invest in big data, cloud, mobility and security enjoy up to 53 percent faster revenue growth than their competitors.

2. Reduced costs

Immediately organizations can save money on physical hardware, maintenance, installation, support and other hidden administration costs. However, the monthly subscription costs of cloud versus on-premises can initially look more expensive; therefore, it is important to consider the overall total cost of ownership because when you factor in migration costs, cloud will almost certainly be a more expensive short-term investment. But the long-term value comes when you start to factor in all the costs outlined above and the opportunity cost of speed to market. Once you have made that move to the cloud, easy access to company data saves time and money with project start-ups.

3. Enhanced productivity

Teams can work on the go and remotely, as cloud enables users to access work securely from any browser and/or cloud mobile application. Additionally, maintenance costs are reduced because there is no need to patch or upgrade, organisations can access the latest features immediately.

4. Robust security

In today’s world of escalating threats, knowing that the cloud environment is secure and compliant with real-time security updates and rigorous practices to track and protect data is critically important. Public cloud service providers invest heavily in maintaining and improving security of their platforms -- their success and survival depends on it.

5. Scale with confidence

Cloud delivers the flexibility to grow at the pace the organization is growing. It also provides an immediate response to dynamic spikes in demand, whereas, with on-premises solutions, there is only a finite number of resources. When using public cloud services, the challenge to grow is the cloud provider’s problem and not the end user’s. This means that end users can have the confidence to grow their business whilst relying on the cloud provider to ensure that the environment scales accordingly.

Why public cloud services are set for growth

There is no doubt that the pandemic has validated the cloud’s value proposition and the ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity. This is providing the impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. According to analysts Gartner, the proportion of IT spending that is shifting to cloud will accelerate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, with cloud projected to make up 14.2 percent of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1 percent in 2020. The increasing use of public cloud services reinforces that cloud adoption is the direction most enterprises are taking.

Matt Muschol is Chief Technology Officer, Clearvision