By 2025, 55% of large enterprises will successfully implement an all-in cloud SaaS strategy. Moving to the cloud is quickly becoming a priority for organizations looking to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive environment. Reduced costs, greater agility, scalability, and the need for remote work capabilities are some of the reasons companies are migrating to the cloud.
Transitioning from on-prem infrastructure to a cloud-based solution is a big decision that involves many moving parts, but it's totally possible. Planning and preparing represent the biggest parts of the migration process and safeguard organizations from making costly mistakes.
The Key to A Successful Atlassian Cloud Migration
For those in the Atlassian ecosystem, migrating to Cloud is more important than ever. Atlassian no longer supports their Server products, which means that if your organization is still operating on Server, you're no longer receiving security updates or bug fixes on your Atlassian tools.
While you can carry out a migration on your own, we recommended working with a Solution Partner due to the complexities and risks involved with migrating from Atlassian’s Server to Cloud. It will make your journey to becoming a cloud-first business much smoother and set you up for success in the long run.
In this article, we explore three organizations that partnered with Praecipio, a Solution Partner specialized in Atlassian Cloud, to guide their teams through the migration process and successfully made it to the other side.
Castlight Health
After falling behind on their Atlassian Server updates and security patches, Castlight Health had accumulated massive technical debt. This resulted in mission-critical tools like Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management being extremely slow. It also made the healthcare navigation company vulnerable to security breaches, outages became more common, system performance lagged, and they had to reboot their Servers constantly. On top of all of this, Castlight was ramping up its remote workforce and the increased VPN usage put even more stress on its already exhausted system.
As an organization in a high-risk security industry, Castlight knew that the best solution for their company and their bottom line would be to migrate to Atlassian Cloud. With the support of Praecipio, Castlight mapped out a solid project plan that listed key migration milestones, potential risks, and how to approach teams internally.
The first order of business in preparing Castlight for its migration journey was cleaning up data, analyzing applications, and communicating project milestones to the rest of the company.
Having a solid plan enabled the migration team to work effectively and helped manage leadership's expectations since they had clear visibility into what was at stake.
Castlight had accumulated 50+ apps over the years, so their migration team enlisted Jira power users from all departments to decide which apps needed to stay or go. Moving data in small chunks at a time, the actual migration took 20+ hours and was followed by rigorous testing, user training, and additional post-migration support.
Since migrating to Atlassian Cloud, Castlight has drastically reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), eliminated downtime, offloaded maintenance, experienced efficiency gains, and improved performance and security. Now, Castlight can focus on what really matters: helping people navigate the complexities of healthcare.
Ginkgo Bioworks
To accommodate their accelerated growth and achieve their ambitious business goals, Ginkgo Bioworks needed a scalable, high-performing environment with more storage. After years of leveraging on-premise Atlassian products, Ginkgo Bioworks knew that migrating to Cloud was the next step in their business transformation journey.
Becoming a cloud-first company would also enable Ginkgo Bioworks to address various Server-related issues, including slow-performing apps, too much downtime, improper tool configuration, and maintenance. To get the job done right and ensure a successful cloud migration, Ginkgo Bioworks brought on Praecipio as their experienced and reliable Solution Partner.
They’re consistently delivering what we want, checking in on us, and giving us their A team. I can throw them at anyone and know they will be professional, thorough, and knowledgeable,”
Bruce Kozuma, Senior Group Product Manager | Ginkgo Bioworks
The first step in Ginkgo’s journey to cloud was laying out a clear migration roadmap, from preparation to migration and post-production support, with cleanup being a top priority. The Praecipio team advised Ginkgo Bioworks to restructure their instances so that users could have a better experience and then analyzed which apps needed to migrate to cloud.
As with any migration, some challenges presented themselves. Some of their apps had a straightforward migration path while others were more complex and involved extracting and aggregating data before migrating. Additionally, because Ginkgo operates in a high-security industry, Praecipio had to find a workaround for accessing their environment to carry out the migration process.
After migrating to cloud, the leading biotech company offloaded maintenance, experienced a high-performing Atlassian environment, tightened security, and enhanced data accuracy which led to making smarter business decisions. With more time and resources available to focus on the work that matters most, Ginkgo Bioworks expects to triple their output and cut their costs in half.
Advanced Energy
Advanced Energy, a global power solutions leader, wanted to migrate from its legacy project management system to Jira Cloud to accelerate its business transformation journey and support its rapid growth.
The energy organization had just completed multiple acquisitions and needed to bring everything together–people, processes, and technology–on a single instance. Another issue that the organization faced was that their development team had deployed Jira Software without any governance, making it difficult to scale their instance because of too many workflows, unchecked configurations, and lack of standardization.
Advanced Energy partnered with Praecipio to effectively manage the transition from their legacy software to Jira Cloud, which would serve as their corporate instance. Praecipio helped the organization define a roadmap that supported their growth initiatives and created governance documentation that would accommodate the development team and how they used Jira.
Once the leading global power supplier migrated to Jira Cloud, they also worked with Praecipio to merge the Jira instances from the acquired companies to their corporate instance and to provide training and post-migration support to end users.
After completing the Jira Cloud migration and initial mergers, Praecipio continued to provide additional support, maintenance, and governance for Advanced Energy’s growing Jira Cloud instance, which had grown from 500 to 12,000 users. Since the initial migration, Advanced Energy has continued to acquire other companies and merge those instances into their Jira Cloud.
How to Become a Cloud-First Company
Migrations make people nervous and for good reason. They're highly complex, involve risk, and require a significant resource investment. But with careful planning along with the guidance of a Cloud Specialized Solution Partner, your Atlassian Cloud migration can be successful.
In a recent webinar, our team discusses the top issues we've seen when migrating our clients from Server to Cloud and answers the most common questions about Atlassian Cloud. You can also download our ebook, where we go into detail about what to expect before migrating and the exact steps you need to follow to transition to cloud.
If you are currently figuring out the next step in your migration journey, Praecipio is here to help. Contact our team of migration experts to analyze your situation and figure out a path that leads you to a successful Atlassian Cloud migration.
