With the push to migrate to cloud and Atlassian ending support for their Server products next year, you may be wondering what the hosting options are for your Atlassian Cloud products. The good news is that Praecipio’s webinar with AWS provides those answers.

In addition to sharing the benefits of hosting your Atlassian stack on AWS, we also explore why running Atlassian software on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful and efficient solution for many organizations. Scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security are just a few of the key benefits that make this an ideal combination for cloud-first businesses using Atlassian.

Scalability

Let’s start by looking at scalability. AWS provides a wide range of services and resources that can be easily scaled up or down to meet your organization’s needs. This allows you to quickly and easily adapt to changing business needs, such as increased traffic or new projects. For example, you can easily add more servers or storage to your Jira or Confluence instances to handle a spike in usage or spin up new resources to support an upcoming project.

For your organization to quickly adapt to the demands of today’s fast moving business landscape, you need scalable and reliable infrastructure. By combining Atlassian’s Data Center offering and AWS Aurora, you’ll be able to apply high availability to your database. Praecipio understands that your Atlassian applications are mission-critical to your business, and we can help you meet and exceed availability requirements when configuring your Atlassian stack in AWS.

Cost-Effectiveness

Another key benefit of running Atlassian software on AWS is cost-effectiveness. AWS provides a pay-as-you-go model that allows you to only pay for the resources you use. This model can help cut down on spending, especially when compared to traditional on-premise solutions that don’t adapt to your specific usage. Additionally, AWS offers several cost-optimization tools and services, such as reserved instances and auto-scaling that can help you further reduce costs. You also can create your own pricing estimate using the AWS Pricing Calculator to better understand the potential cost savings for your organization.

Security

Security is another important benefit of running Atlassian software on AWS. AWS provides a wide range of security features and services that protect your data and applications. This includes security groups, network firewalls, and encryption services. AWS also has a number of compliance certifications, such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA that can help you meet regulatory requirements.

Integrations

Finally, Atlassian’s software and AWS have several integrations and plugins that improve the functionality and ease-of-use of both systems. For example, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk plugin for Jira allows users to easily manage their AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments directly from Jira. Similarly, the AWS CloudFormation plugin for Confluence allows users to create and manage their AWS CloudFormation templates directly from Confluence.

In conclusion, running Atlassian software on AWS is an ideal solution for many organizations. It provides scalability, cost-effectiveness, security, and integration capabilities that can help organizations improve their software’s performance and ease-of-use. To learn more about the benefits of AWS and Atlassian, watch our on-demand webinar, Scaling in the Cloud, No Gear Required: Exploring Atlassian’s Cloud Powered by AWS. 

You’ll hear from Praecipio’s Technical Solutions Architect, Luis Machado, and AWS Partner Solutions Architect, Angela Bartlett, on how to leverage Atlassian Cloud to scale, better maintain security and governance, and drive change within your organization. Dave Treft, from our client Ginkgo Bioworks, will also share how migrating to Atlassian Cloud with Praecipio helped Ginkgo achieve exponential growth. 

While it is possible to migrate to Atlassian Cloud on your own, working with a Cloud Specialized partner like Praecipio allows your team to focus on work that drives your business forward and ensures your migration is done in the most efficient way possible. 

We also understand that there are scenarios where hosting your Atlassian instance in the cloud is not feasible. Praecipio’s Cumulus hosting solution is optimized to support Atlassian products and provides additional customization options, as well as the support of a dedicated team with decades of experience in the Atlassian platform. Learn more about our Modern Service Management  here.

When we initially set out to write a piece about how to implement an IT Modernization Strategy, we quickly realized there is not only a lot to consider when weighing the possibilities, but also a lot of context required to lay a meaningful foundation. We want to discuss what IT Modernization is and what it means for your individual business, as well as other terms and ideas to help define the overall picture.

What is IT Modernization

We'll begin by exploring the motive behind IT Modernization, and identifying the traits that make up the profile of an entity that is looking to implement IT Modernization in their enterprise.  Overarching themes include Digital Transformation, Capital Expenses vs Operational Expenses, Legacy Systems, how Cloud fits into the picture (because it's no longer a question of "if" cloud fits into the picture), as well as others.

There are several questions to ask when trying to nail down the motive- we'll be working through these questions in our series:

• Why would you be interested in IT Modernization in the first place?
• What are some of the apparent benefits of IT Modernization? 
• What would IT Modernization look like in your organization and how?
• What would a rollout plan look like?
• When do you tackle certain things over others?

By the end of this series our goal is that you will have the foundational understanding of IT Modernization that will help you answer these questions.

The Basics

If you've worked with Praecipio before, you know we like to start simple - so let's begin with the basic question "What is IT Modernization?"  To oversimplify the concept, IT Modernization is a process of assessing an individual system or group of systems in your organization with the intent of establishing the best possible balance of cost and efficiency. One of the challenges we often call out is that this can look vastly different depending on the context of what it is being applied to.

As part of an IT Modernization strategy there can be some aspects of your business where it makes sense to move in a more digital direction, for example migrating on-prem resources to virtualization or the cloud. While the overarching goal may be to get to the cloud, there are different paths that you organization may take based on your specific context. In the case of moving  an application to the cloud, there are the branches hosting the application on a digital platform like AWS or moving completely to a more SaaS model and allow it to be maintained by a third party.  And of course, for some other aspects of your business it could make more sense to maintain an on-prem solution but update the infrastructure. The key thing to consider here is how you can balance the cost of maintaining whatever aspect of your business you're assessing with the amount of performance proficiency it is providing.

Another term you'll often hear mentioned in the same breath as IT Modernization is Digital Transformation.  It's true that these often go hand-in-hand, but the main difference to consider is that Digital Transformation gets into the explicit changes you have to make in order to keep pace with the digitization of aspects of your business, like products, assets, and processes. IT Modernization is more of a strategy for improving your business through cost savings, efficiency or improving on how agile your business can be. More often than not, Digital Transformation will be a key part of your IT Modernization plan, but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The Breakdown

With that in mind, let's start to identify the motive a business might have for exploring IT Modernization and what attributes make up its profile. The first question you have to ask is "Why would you even be interested in IT Modernization?" The short answer is every business should be thinking about IT Modernization on some level. We exist in a world where the only true constant is change, and as time progresses the main thing that we're betting on is that our technology and business landscapes will continue to shift. The most successful businesses will adjust business practices to match - if you're not willing to embrace the change and make it work for you, your competitor will, and they'll be happy to take your market share off your hands. Additionally, IT Modernization benefits the business, either by lowering your operating costs, or empowering you to be more efficient managing resources and development. Thinking about ways you can Modernize aspects of your business is just good business.

So how do you this? What does it look like?  Well, we've touched on the two key factors associated with Modernization: Cost and Efficiency.  There are a couple schools of thought when it comes to the approach and how you can execute modernization, outlined below.

The first approach would be considered a more traditional approach. This approach involves making incremental changes made over time targeting the most costly or bottlenecked aspects of the business. From this you can attempt to figure out how you can make them more efficient or cost less, or maybe a combination of both. The main benefit of an approach like this pertains to risk: changing pieces incrementally allows you to carefully consider those changes and their impact on the business as a whole. Incremental changes can also be very good for the bottom line since it allows you to budget changes over time.  One of the potential downsides to an incremental approach is it can be limiting. Taking the time to make incremental changes can take.. well... time.

On the other end of the spectrum there's the end-to-end or holistic approach.  This is about what you'd expect: instead of incrementally making changes you're making a plan to implement broad changes across your organization as a whole. This requires careful planning and consideration of what elements need to change in what sequence, to truly understand the potential impact across the organization. One of the benefits of this approach is it keeps the organization from advancing in a siloed manner, which can lead to less efficiency as a whole. In one instance, that might mean two different business groups moving their application to two different cloud solutions that offer the same functionality. Whether your approach is more incremental or end-to-end, it's important to try to take into account the potential impact across the business and ensure groups coordinate the efforts.

Modernization  Mechanisms

When it comes to implementing IT Modernization, it's important to understand that it is much more than a simple update to your technologies. Rather, the approach should be thoughtful and well planned, with an eye to the future and a willingness to embrace the new and sunset the old. At a high level it is important for your teams to identify out of its legacy software or assets what can can be invested in - whether through legacy software modernization or replatforming- and what should be divested from. Reaching a decision on the best path forward for each application will take time - legacy modernization is not an all or nothing endeavor. We'll spend dedicated time in future posts discussing how you can best approach application modernization. 

It's Just the Beginning

As you consider what IT Modernization means for your organization, keep in mind that there is not a one size fits all solution. Our goal is to provide helpful context to help you define what an IT Modernization approach could look like and what success would mean to your organization.

At Praecipio, we enjoy helping our clients reach their IT Modernization goals and bringing teams up to speed with digital demand. If you'd like to learn more about how we can help, please reach out to us!