A cloud migration is the fastest way to ensure that your teams can work from (literally!) anywhere. 

A move to the Atlassian Cloud, in particular, comes with a plethora of benefits for your business. 

In fact, 47% of Atlassian customers reported that their move to the Atlassian Cloud led to improvement in cross-functional collaboration. Some of the other stated benefits include: 

• A centralised mission control centre to help accelerate Jira administration  

• Faster deployment of new features and updates by avoiding the need to set up servers, configure hardware, or install software 

• Improved performance, scalability, and reliability 

• Seamless cross-product experiences that help you move faster, collaborate better, and accelerate speed to market 

This is why many companies are increasingly migrating to the Atlassian Cloud, despite being on the cloud already with other service providers. Sometimes, a cloud-to-cloud (C2C) migration can happen as the effect of a merger and acquisition (M&A), where both companies involved have the full Atlassian stack and need to consolidate their federated instances. 

In either case, there can be many challenges you could anticipate if you initiate a cloud-to-cloud migration that involves merging your Jira instances. Let’s look at some of these challenges in this blog and discuss best practices to reconcile your Atlassian Jira instances into a unified organisation. 

Important Update: As of October 16, 2024, Atlassian has updated their pricing and packaging for both list and advantaged customers across its key cloud products and plans. Learn what key steps you need to take now! 

Key Challenges in Linking Jira Instances During A Cloud-to-Cloud Migration

1. Inconsistent Data Structures: If your organisation maintains multiple Jira instances, they may have been customised differently over time, leading to inconsistencies in issue types, workflows, field configurations, and custom fields. A Jira instance reconciliation would require aligning these structures without losing any functionality or data. 

2. Corrupted Data: Data stored in your Atlassian server or data centre or on another cloud platform may be incomplete or corrupted in one or more instances, which could cause cloud migration failures or post-migration issues. 

3. Data Loss: Migrating large volumes of attachments and comments might fail or result in data loss if not handled properly. 

4. User Duplication Issues: If different Jira instances have overlapping users with different roles or permissions, reconciling user data can be complex (especially during a cloud migration, which is also a complex process!) 

4. Permission Discrepancies: Reconciling and standardising permission schemes can be tricky—especially when different Jira instances have distinct project permissions, roles, and security settings. 

5. Customisation Differences: Jira allows users the flexibility to customise workflows, screens, automation, and configurations. Therefore, migrating such complex settings consistently across instances and ensuring that they work seamlessly in the cloud environment can be a challenge. 

6. Compatibility Issues: Add-ons (plugins) in the original Jira instances may not be supported or may behave differently in the Atlassian Cloud. Identifying which add-ons are obsolete, need to be replaced, or can be migrated seamlessly, becomes essential. 

Apart from these challenges, a heavy volume of transactional and historical data in your Jira instances may cause issues while migrating to the Atlassian Cloud. Moreover, migrating large Jira instances could lead to performance degradation and require significant downtime, which could negatively impact ongoing projects and users.

Worried about consolidating Jira instances during your Atlassian Cloud migration? Book a free instance audit and discovery session with Corptec Technology Partners today! 

5 Best Practices for Atlassian Jira Instance Consolidation During A Cloud-to-Cloud Migration

It goes without saying that migrating to the cloud while reconciling your Jira instances can be an intricate process that requires meticulous planning. Let’s look at five best practices recommended by Corptec’s Atlassian solution consultants to ensure a successful Jira instance consolidation. 

1. Conducting A Comprehensive Pre-Migration Assessment

Before diving into the migration process, our consultants recommend conducting a thorough assessment of all Jira instances involved. This includes: 

• Analysing current instances: Corptec’s Atlassian consultants can help you understand the structure, customisations, and configurations of each of your Jira instances during our complimentary instance audit session. This will help you identify similarities and differences that could impact your instance consolidation. 

• Taking an inventory of projects and schemes: In this step, our Jira consultants will help you create an inventory of all your projects, workflows, custom fields, and schemes in each Jira instance. This will help you identify redundancies and plan your consolidation strategy better. 

• Involving key stakeholders: It is important to engage key stakeholders from different teams (such as the CEO, CFO, CTO, IT-ERP Managers, and your Cloud Architects and Consultants) so that you may gather their insights and ensure seamless alignment on your C2C migration goals and expectations. 

2. Standardising Configurations

As discussed above, one of the main challenges in linking multiple Jira instances is dealing with inconsistencies in configurations across instances. In order to address this, our Atlassian solution consultants recommend the following steps: 

• Unifying schemes: Corptec’s consultants suggest standardising your Jira workflows, issue types, permission schemes, and notification schemes to help simplify your cloud migration process and reduce post-migration issues. 

• Ensuring consistency: The next step is to make sure that your custom fields are consistent across instances. Our Jira consultants can help you merge similar custom fields and eliminate duplicates to help maintain data quality and integrity. 

3. Performing Data Cleansing and Attachment Optimisation

The biggest mistake our Jira consultants have observed across many data or cloud migration projects is the transfer of poor quality data (i.e. data that is inaccurate, inconsistent, inaccessible, duplicated, outdated, or unverified) to their new and consolidated Atlassian Cloud environment. This not only complicates the consolidation process but also leads to performance issues. Our Jira consultants, therefore, recommend the following steps: 

• Archiving old projects: Before going live with the cloud migration, you would need to identify and archive outdated or inactive Jira projects that are no longer needed (either in your parent company or in the merged organisation). This helps reduce clutter and improves system performance. 

• Deleting redundant data: The next recommended step is to remove duplicate issues, unused custom fields, and obsolete configurations. This ensures a clean slate that’s required for an organised and efficient migration. 

• Optimising attachments: The last step in data cleansing is to review and optimise your attachments (you could consider using a cloud storage solution provider for large files). This will help you minimise storage requirements and improve your cloud-to-cloud migration speed. 

Would you like to explore an Atlassian Cloud Backup solution that not only provides ample storage for your data but also offers data security, seamless recovery, and system scalability—all in just one-click? Get in touch with us for Hybrid, Multi-Cloud and SaaS Backup today!

4. Using Migration Tools and Automation

Ever since Atlassian announced that they would be ending support for their server products in February 2024, many companies have taken to migrating their on-premise ecosystem to the Atlassian Cloud. To encourage such customers, Atlassian offers specialised app assessment tools to ease the cloud migration process. 

Related: Check out our Cloud Migration Checklist for more details 

According to Corptec’s Atlassian solution consultants, leveraging these cloud-friendly tools can help you: 

• Migrate data: By utilising Atlassian’s Jira Cloud Migration Assistant in partnership with Corptec’s Jira instance consolidation services, you can choose to migrate multiple spaces at once or one at a time. The tool also facilitates data mapping, data transfer, and data validation during the cloud migration process. 

• Automate testing processes: With Atlassian’s Jira Cloud Migration Assistant, you can implement automated testing to verify data integrity and functionality post migration. This ensures that all configurations, workflows, and permissions are correctly consolidated.  

• Enable continuous monitoring: Atlassian Cloud migration tools can not only help you test and migrate effortlessly but also assist you in monitoring the migration process in real-time. This helps in identifying and resolving issues promptly. Additionally, these tools can provide insights and alerts to streamline your cloud-to-cloud migration process. 

5. Validating Instances Post-Migration

As the last step, our Atlassian consultants recommend validating the consolidated Jira instances post migration and availing Corptec’s support in ensuring a smooth transition. This support would include: 

• Data validation: You can take our Jira consultants’ support in performing a comprehensive data validation to ensure that all your Jira projects, issues, and configurations have been accurately migrated. Additionally, our consultants can help address any discrepancies or issues that arise during or post the cloud-to-cloud migration. 

• User Training: Corptec’s Jira consultants can also provide training sessions to both existing and new users to help them get familiarised with the consolidated instance environment. The training would be aimed at minimising disruptions and improving user adoption. 

• Ongoing Support: Finally, we recommend establishing a support chat to address any post-migration issues. This includes conducting regular reviews and optimising the reconciled instances to maintain the performance and efficiency of your migrated Atlassian products. 

We understand that there may be reasons why your organisation may decide to keep your instances federated in spite of an upcoming or ongoing Atlassian Cloud migration. If you would like to learn what are the pros and cons of maintaining multiple, independent instances versus consolidating them, read this blog!

Consolidating Jira Instances During Cloud-to-Cloud Migration: How Corptec Technology Partners Can Help

Migrating and consolidating multiple Jira instances during a cloud-to-cloud migration can be a complex task, but following our expert-recommended best practices can help ensure a successful transition. If you still have questions about how best to effect a cloud-to-cloud migration without losing your existing workflows, issues, or other Jira data, let Corptec make things easy for you! 

As a Gold Solution partner since 2018, Corptec Technology Partners has helped organisations across Australia and the United States navigate their Atlassian journey in a scalable and flexible way. Corptec specialises in providing comprehensive custom development and API integration services for Jira Cloud and all other Atlassian products. Our solution consultants come with extensive knowledge and experience dealing with Atlassian product suites and can help you navigate through an Atlassian Cloud migration while consolidating multiple Atlassian instances as per your business needs.  

Recently, we helped a leading learning solutions provider consolidate 6 global instances successfully. We also helped consolidate 7 separate cloud sites into a single organisation for a major payment solutions organisation in Australia. 

Corptec’s diverse and qualified team can offer you a free assessment of your current instances. This includes a detailed instance-by-instance audit of your organisation’s usage of Atlassian licenses, based on your projects and configurations. It helps you review your license usage by documenting the exact number of product licenses being used and analysing if there are redundant licenses being paid for. Doing this assessment can help you achieve significant savings for your team. 

Post the free audit, we offer you guidance on optimising your instance landscape—starting from cleaning up your projects, custom fields, spaces, or branches that aren’t actively being used to helping you reconcile your instances and migrate seamlessly to the Atlassian Cloud. However, we understand that for various reasons, your company might prefer a hybrid approach. If this is the case, we help you find the middle ground—i.e. consolidating the majority of your instances while maintaining separate instances for critical or confidential projects. 

Additionally, our Atlassian solution consultants can help you: 

• Transition to the cloud with minimal downtime  

• Configure Atlassian tools to align with your business processes 

• Support you in doing a site clean-up 

• Enable you to bring down unnecessary costs and instance overhead 

• Execute an instance consolidation with minimum hiccups 

• Optimise your migration workflows  

• Mitigate potential security risks  

• Provide stable technical support  

• Address application performance issues post migration 

Being Atlassian’s select partner gives us access to exclusive benefits (including cost-effective pricing models, free trials, and more) that you can avail when you partner with us. 

Moreover, if you need help with stakeholder buy-in before making a decision, you can count on Corptec’s team to guide you at every step. Feel free to give us a call or book a meeting with our expert. We will be there to assist you—whatever your choice! 

Book a walkthrough meeting with our Atlassian expert today!