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Cloud migration guide
Welcome to the Cloud migration guide!
We’re here to help you move confidently through your migration journey by splitting it up into digestible phases and highlighting the tools, resources, and support you’ll need at every step.
Looking for more hands on advice?
In addition to this guide, our free migration demo offers advice, tips, and best practices for each phase, along with live chat Q&A with our migration support team throughout the demo.
Migrating over 1,000 users?
While most teams can manage the migration on their own, customers migrating 1,001+ users should contact us directly for additional support and to schedule a migration window with our team (especially those planning a migration after hours or on the weekend). Contact us no later than 2 months before your intended migration date to make sure we have resources to support you.
Now let’s get going — onwards!
Introduction
Moving to Cloud is a team sport between Atlassian, Solution Partners, our Marketplace Partners, and most importantly: you. Within the Atlassian Migration Program, we provide free tools, resources, and support to make sure you’re on the right path and your move is successful — starting with this guide.
Meet the team
We offer a few different support channels to help you throughout your migration. The level of support you need will depend on your stage in the migration journey and your migration complexity, which can be impacted by factors like user count, apps and products you’re looking to migrate (more on that later).
- Atlassian Community – Ask migration questions, find answers and support, and connect with other Atlassian users
- Advocates – Discuss topics related to pricing, features, differences between Cloud and self-managed, and more
- Cloud Migration Managers and Migration Support Engineers – Resolve technical issues and in some cases, provide additional migration guidance
- Solution Partners – Network of trusted third-party Partners who can support an end-to-end migration or carry out specific migration tasks
Learn more about our support scope and how to reach out, and when to consider a Solution Partner.
Our free migration tools
The most important tools at your disposal are the free Cloud migration trial, and our Cloud Migration Assistants for Jira and Confluence.
Learn about each, and how to leverage them as a first step towards Cloud:
Cloud migration trial
We provide a free Cloud migration trial for Server and Data Center customers considering a migration to Cloud. The trial lasts the duration of your Server maintenance or Data Center subscription (for up to 12 months), and matches your current self-managed user tier (up to 20,000 users). If you’re nearing the end of your maintenance or your maintenance has already expired, you’re still eligible for a 2 month Cloud migration trial. With the trial you can:
- Explore Standard and Premium Cloud features and functionality, and evaluate the differences in Cloud
- Build a proof of concept to see what life in Cloud is like, and demo it with your stakeholders
- Test your migration as many times as you like, and once you’re ready, run the real thing and use the trial as your production license
We strongly recommend signing up with a URL you plan to keep as your new production site once your migration is complete.
Cloud Migration Assistants
Our Cloud Migration Assistants for Jira and Confluence are free apps available from our Marketplace, or depending on your version, may already be installed on your self-managed instances. The assistants help you assess and audit your apps, and clean up your data prior to migrating. Depending on the migration method you choose, the tools you use to actually migrate your data may differ.
- For Confluence customers, the Cloud Migration Assistant can easily migrate your spaces, users, and groups to Cloud. Learn more about what data gets migrated with Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant
- For Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Core you can use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate your data. Learn more about what data gets migrated with Jira Cloud Migration Assistant
- For Bitbucket, you can use the Bitbucket Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate your code, users, and pull requests. Learn more about what data gets migrated with Bitbucket Cloud Migration Assistant
Cost comparison tools
To help best assess your costs between Server and Cloud, we’ve built pricing tools that provide a comprehensive view and estimation of pricing.
- See a holistic view of what actually goes into your costs by estimating your total cost of ownership in Cloud compared to Server or Data Center. Calculate your cloud savings
- Get a personalized cost estimate for your products and Marketplace apps in Cloud or Server. You can also add additional products or apps and change your Cloud plan or user count to see how costs may change. View your estimate
Technical documentation
Our technical documentation is available and linked throughout the guide to provide you with step-by-step details on preparing and executing your migration, as well as supplemental information on setting up and getting the most out of your Cloud products.
In addition to the above, we’re continuing to add to and improve upon our migration tools and resources. View our migrations roadmap to see what we’re working on.
Technical documentation
Our technical documentation is available and linked throughout the guide to provide you with step-by-step details on preparing and executing your migration, as well as supplemental information on setting up and getting the most out of your Cloud products.
In addition to the above, we’re continuing to add to and improve upon our migration tools and resources. View our migrations roadmap to see what we’re working on.
Understanding your requirements
Before you begin your journey to Cloud, there are a few questions to consider to get a basic understanding of your migration requirements:
- What are your goals with the move, and what are you hoping to accomplish in the long-term?
- What’s your timeline? Is some data ready to move now vs. later?
- What’s your budget?
- How much time can you and your team dedicate to migration? Who will be involved?
- What products are you looking to migrate, and what’s your company size?
- What are your security, legal, compliance, and privacy requirements?
- What are your team’s Marketplace app must-haves?
To help determine your timeline and budget, it’s good to have a general understanding of how long migrations can take. Migration timelines can vary greatly, depending on the complexity of your migration, the strategy you choose, and the budget and resources you allocate to the project.
To give you a rough estimate, these are the migration timeframes we typically see:
- Up to 1,000 users: ~3 months
- 1,000 to 5,000 users: ~6 months
- 5,000+ users: ~9 months+
Keep these questions in the back of your mind throughout the next phase to help you make decisions regarding planning and strategy.
Assess phase
The first phase in our journey is the Assess phase. This is where you’ll take stock of your current landscape, and understand the differences between Cloud and self-managed deployments such as features, maintenance, and costs.
Self-managed vs cloud
There are a few key differences to consider when deciding between deployments. With cloud, Atlassian takes on more responsibility for operations, which has implications for your cost distribution and administration experience. Continue reading to learn more about the differences and how you can evaluate them for your team.
What sets Cloud apart
Deployment and administration
Unlike our self-managed products that require your time and attention for maintenance, upgrades, hosting, and more, our Cloud products are hosted, setup, secured, maintained, and updated by Atlassian — taking the administrative burden off your team. You’ll always have access to the latest features, improvements, and security updates without the need for manual version upgrades. Download our Becoming an Atlassian Cloud admin guide to learn more about making the transition.
To cover your bases, remember the MAGIC 5
Evaluating your current landscape can seem daunting (don’t get us started on how many Confluence pages we have). After assisting countless teams with their cloud migrations, we noticed a few key areas that deserve a closer look to ensure you’re setup for a smooth migration. To help remember these topics, we use a mnemonic device: MAGIC. MAGIC outlines the steps for assessing your server or Data Center instances to identify and mitigate potential friction points and get to cloud faster.
For migrations with higher user counts (over 1000), Atlassian will go through this process with you to ensure you’re setup for success.
MAGIC stands for the following:
- Migration strategy
- Apps, integrations, and customizations
- Growth and scalability
- Identity management
- Compliance and security
What sets Cloud apart
Deployment and administration
Unlike our self-managed products that require your time and attention for maintenance, upgrades, hosting, and more, our Cloud products are hosted, setup, secured, maintained, and updated by Atlassian — taking the administrative burden off your team. You’ll always have access to the latest features, improvements, and security updates without the need for manual version upgrades. Download our Becoming an Atlassian Cloud admin guide to learn more about making the transition.
Deployment and administration
Unlike our self-managed products that require your time and attention for maintenance, upgrades, hosting, and more, our Cloud products are hosted, setup, secured, maintained, and updated by Atlassian — taking the administrative burden off your team. You’ll always have access to the latest features, improvements, and security updates without the need for manual version upgrades. Download our Becoming an Atlassian Cloud admin guide to learn more about making the transition.
Cloud plans and pricing
Cloud offers either monthly per-user-pricing or annual subscriptions. Monthly subscriptions are charged based on the exact number of licensed users on the product each month. Annual subscriptions are charged based on the user tier you fall into, and are offered at a reduced rate.
We also offer a range of pricing plans that were designed to meet the needs of all types of teams. To dive deeper into the features included in each pricing plan by product, visit our pricing pages below:
To support teams of all types, we also offer pricing discounts for community and academic subscriptions, Open Source subscriptions, and government institutions.
Customers migrating 1,001+ users, may be eligible for additional pricing incentives such as loyalty discounts and dual licensing.
If you’re unsure of which plan you need, claim your free Cloud migration trial to test out Standard and Premium features, cost and commitment-free.
User management and Atlassian Access
When managing users in Cloud, creating an organization and verifying your domains give you a centralized view of all users at your company across multiple Cloud sites and Atlassian Cloud products. This will also give admins more control with the ability to implement security policies across claimed user accounts.
To get additional enterprise-grade security and centralized administration, we’ve built Atlassian Access, which works across the entirety of your Atlassian Cloud products with a single subscription. Some considerations for evaluating whether you need Atlassian Access:
- Does your company have security requirements around cloud applications?
- Do you need SAML SSO for streamlined access and authentication?
- Do you need automated user lifecycle management connected to your internal directory?
Access allows for scalable governance with features like user provisioning, SAML SSO, Active Directory sync, enforced 2FA, API token controls and more. We recommend migrators evaluate whether or not they need Access as early as possible to get a full understanding of their Cloud landscape. If you still wish to use your on-premise Active Directory, you’ll also need a cloud identity provider to connect with your Cloud products.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
If you’re unsure of which plan you need, claim your free Cloud migration trial to test out Standard and Premium features, cost and commitment-free.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
If you’re unsure of which plan you need, claim your free Cloud migration trial to test out Standard and Premium features, cost and commitment-free.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
See what's coming
We’re continuously innovating and improving upon our Cloud solutions. Check out our Cloud roadmap to see what’s coming soon and to plan for migration capabilities that will ease your move.
Assess apps and integrations
Similar to the previous step, take stock of the current apps (also referred to as plugins) you’ve installed or built on your own. Assess which apps you'll need in Cloud by following our step-by-step guide, and examine the following questions to help guide your assessment:
- How is each app being used? Are they all being used for their intended purpose?
- How many people are taking advantage of the apps?
- Are multiple apps serving the same purpose?
- Is the same app functionality available natively in the Cloud product?
- What’s the cost difference between Server and Cloud apps?
- Have any app licenses expired?
The main things to focus on when auditing your apps is whether they are available in Cloud, and if the data can be migrated or not.
If you aren’t able to download the Cloud Migration Assistants, use our manual guide to app assessment.
As we mentioned before, assessing your current landscape and your cloud needs is the crucial first step to a successful migration. Make sure you spend enough time in this phase to truly understand your migration complexity.
Once you have a good grasp of things, you can move on to planning the migration.
Plan phase
Now that you’ve taken the time to research Cloud, assess your self-managed setup, and assemble your team, it’s time to start planning the actual migration.
Get set up in Cloud
Using your Cloud migration trial, or if you aren't eligible, by purchasing a new Cloud site, there are two steps that need to be done right off the bat if you're thinking about using Atlassian Access for additional security across your site — setting up your organization and verifying your domain. Note that these are not required, but are a prerequisite for implementing Atlassian Access.
Choose your migration strategy and method
The method you choose will depend on your team’s unique needs for migration. Review the sections below to understand and choose the best strategy and method for your team.
Under 10,000 users | Over 10,000 users |
Atlassian recommends a lift and shift method. | Please contact us or a cloud-specialized solution partner as soon as possible to learn about additional migration methods that will best fit your organization's needs. |
Download the Cloud migration toolkit for comms templates, runbook templates, and more.
Lift and shift
A lift and shift migration focuses on migrating your instance in a single downtime window. To do this, proper planning and data preparation is required ahead of time to ensure your downtime window is efficient and smooth. A lift and shift migration includes several key actions to help make your migration smoother, some of which include:
- Reviewing and cleaning up your data
- Choosing what apps, projects, and spaces to migrate
- Pre-migrating users and attachments
- Running test migrations and user-acceptance testing
While your migration timeline will vary depending on your data size and complexity, you can expect the following average migration lengths:
0 - 5,000 users | 5,000 - 10,000 users | 10,000+ users |
4 months | 6 months | 6+ months |
Download the Cloud migration toolkit for comms templates, runbook templates, and more.
Building out your migration plan should be a team effort and should factor in the results from your assessments as well as the tactical steps listed above. Here are some additional considerations for when you are creating your lift and shift migration plan:
- Descaling your data (RECOMMENDED)
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Not every piece of data on your self-managed instance needs to migrate. Cleaning up your data before migrating can help reduce migration downtime and make for less work post-migration.
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The migration assistants will help you choose what data to migrate.
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User management setup
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If you’re using a self-managed LDAP or Active Directory as your user authentication method, you must use Atlassian Access, which acts as the bridge between your identity provider and Atlassian cloud products. See our Access and cloud migration documentation.
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Learn about how users, groups, and permissions are migrated for each product.
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Cloud adoption (RECOMMENDED)
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The success of your cloud migration hinges on teams actively using the tools you implement to work smarter and faster, which is why we recommend building your organizational change management plan early in your migration. To help, we created the Cloud Adoption Toolkit, a collection of resources that offers practical guidance, templates, and onboarding materials you can use to navigate the people side of change and accelerate value realization from your cloud investment.
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The remainder of this guide will help walk you through the remaining phases of a lift and shift migration, including the necessary steps, resources, and guidance for a successful migration.
Get set up in cloud
As part of your plan, you must decide if you are going to use a cloud migration trial, or if you aren't eligible, purchase a new cloud site for your migration. Once decided, there are two steps that need to be done right immediately if you're thinking about using Atlassian Access for additional security across your site — setting up your organization and verifying your domain. Note that these are not required, but are a prerequisite for implementing Atlassian Access.
Deciding if you need Atlassian Access
Download the Cloud migration toolkit for comms templates, runbook templates, and more.
Setting up your organization
As a refresher, an organization lets you view all of the Atlassian cloud users at your company (across multiple Atlassian sites and products) in one place, manage your users' accounts, and setup security features like SAML SSO. An organization is automatically created for every site, or you can transfer a site into an existing organization. To access your organization, go to admin.atlassian.com and follow these steps on how to setup, rename, and add products and sites to your organization.
Verifying your domain
Verifying your domain will secure ownership of your company’s domain and claim all users' accounts (also referred to as managed accounts) with that same domain. Choose a method and follow the steps on how to verify a domain for your organization. This can take up to 72 hours, so you’ll want to do this early on.
We recommend documenting your migration project plan, including planned activities, estimated timings, owners, and dependencies for each task. With your plan in place, it’s time to move on to preparing your teams and data for your migration.
With your plan and people in place, it's time to move on to the Prep phase.
Prep phase
Now that you have your plan together, it’s time to prep your team, environments, and data for the big move. This phase can take time — anywhere from days to weeks — so make sure you leave enough time to complete this section. If you have resource constraints or need more hands-on support, you can connect with a Solution Partner to manage the heavy lifting.
Prep your team and site
With your plan and estimated timelines in place, start socializing the details of your migration with stakeholders, and the teams who will be impacted so your users can get started smoothly with minimal disruption to their work. For some companies, this step may happen sooner depending on the criticality of the products being migrated. It’s also best to establish a communications cadence for when, and how often, you’ll be communicating updates so teams are informed and prepared for the change.
Build your runbook and timeline
Put together a runbook or step-by-step checklist of what needs to happen when, supporting instructions, who the owner is for each task, and how long each step will take. Document which steps are dependent on each other and will prevent you from moving forward if not completed. At the end of your runbook, include a mitigation plan with owners just in case you need to roll anything back.
To get started, download our runbook template and modify any tasks as needed. You can watch our short video on how to use the template.
In the next phase, you’ll use your runbook to run your test migration, and make adjustments as needed.
Clean up your Server instance
The more data you migrate, the longer and more complex your migration is likely to be, and could affect Cloud performance later on. Use your migration as an opportunity to clean up your Server instance before running your test migration.
Some things to look out for might be inactive apps or users, old product data such as projects, customizations, or workflows that can be simplified or left behind, and any duplicate data. Refer to our documentation for best practices on cleanup.
Ensure you’re on a supported Server version
Depending on the migration method you’ve chosen, you may need to be on a certain version of your Server or Data Center instance to execute your migration. Check the supported versions below:
Complete the pre-migration checklist
Before running your test migration, review our detailed pre-migration checklist to make sure your data and environment is ready to go.
Prep your team and site
With your plan and estimated timelines in place, start socializing the details of your migration with stakeholders, and the teams who will be impacted so your users can get started smoothly with minimal disruption to their work. For some companies, this step may happen sooner depending on the criticality of the products being migrated. It’s also best to establish a communications cadence for when, and how often, you’ll be communicating updates so teams are informed and prepared for the change.
Communication
Now that your timelines and project owners are in place, you need to effectively communicate your rollout plan and build enthusiasm for the shift to cloud.
If you’re using the Cloud Migration Assistants, check our documentation for step-by-step guidance:
Dive into our guidance, designed to help you build a communication plan that keeps stakeholders in the loop at every stage of your journey. This resource outlines crucial considerations for smooth team communication, such as:
- When will the migration occur?
- What downtime can users expect?
- What will happen to the old product site(s) after migrating? Will it still be accessible?
- What will the new URL(s) be?
- How will users sign in?
- Who do users reach out to if they run into any issues or have trouble logging in?
- What onboarding materials can they review to get acclimated to cloud?
Keep in mind that there may be issues that occur during the migration that you may need to troubleshoot, so call out an adjustment period to your users to get your site cleaned up and working as planned.
For a smooth team transition, consider establishing a transparent process for gathering feedback and addressing user inquiries regarding the move to the cloud. Options like office hours or a dedicated chat room can enhance communication effectiveness.
Training and support
Migrating to cloud opens up new possibilities for your teams. Make sure you're set for key changes like user logins, updated URLs, changes to apps, and a new user interface. Tap into insights from your UAT to understand top user concerns and spot areas where targeted training can make a difference.
Explore these helpful resources to effortlessly guide your users through the cloud migration journey and guarantee ongoing support during this transformative period:
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Setting your users up for success in Atlassian cloud - a guide for admins highlighting the most significant differences users will encounter when logging into cloud products the first time, so admins can prepare teams for the change ahead
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Cloud onboarding and training resource hub - curated resources to aid admins and change management leaders in the development of a robust onboarding and training program. This is specifically designed for teams migrating to Cloud from Server or Data Center and includes support documentation, Atlassian University courses, demos, and blog posts, to cater to diverse learning styles
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In-depth product guides for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management - everything you need to know about using and customizing our products, getting started, and best practices
Do you feel prepared for your migration? If so, move on to the test phase to but your plan and prep into action.
Test phase
In this phase you’ll do a test run and make sure everything is in order, figure out how long the migration will take, and uncover any issues before the production migration.
Test migration
Regardless of company size or migration complexity, we recommend all customers run through a test migration before executing a production migration. Make sure you’ve completed everything in the pre-migration checklist from the Prep phase before using our testing guide to walk through your test migration.
Backup your data
Regardless of which migration strategy and method you’ve chosen, we recommend backing up your self-managed instance prior to migrating it. If there is data in your Cloud site already, ensure this is backed up as well. See our documentation for guidance:
Backup your data
Regardless of which migration strategy and method you’ve chosen, we recommend backing up your self-managed instance prior to migrating it. If there is data in your Cloud site already, ensure this is backed up as well. See our documentation for guidance:
Backup your data
Regardless of which migration strategy and method you’ve chosen, we recommend backing up your self-managed instance prior to migrating it. If there is data in your Cloud site already, ensure this is backed up as well. See our documentation for guidance:
User Acceptance Testing
Part of the test migration is conducting User Acceptance Testing (UAT) so your end users can replicate common day-to-day tasks, and make sure they work as expected. Through this process you can uncover any issues that will impact your end users and help your teams prepare to work in Cloud. Review step 6 of the testing guide for details on conducting UAT.
After you’ve run your test migration and have an idea of how much time your migration will take, choose the date for production migration. If possible, schedule your migration at night, over a weekend, or another time when your team is less likely to need access to your self-managed instance or Cloud site to reduce the risk of disruption and data discrepancies. Don’t forget to factor in some extra time for troubleshooting!
If you’re migrating over 1,000 users, please contact us 2 months before your intended migration date.
Migrate phase
The day is here to embark on the most highly anticipated step in the migration process. In this phase you’ll resolve any last-minute issues, run your production migration, and move your users and data over to Cloud. Be sure you’ve completed the pre-migration checklist and test migration before beginning this step.
Set your Server to read-only
Depending on the migration strategy you chose, your users may no longer need access to your self-managed instance. To avoid any confusion and help with the switchover, put your sites into read-only mode prior to migrating. For Confluence Server, work through each space and remove all permissions for anything other than read. There is no explicit "read-only" mode in Jira Server, but you can do it manually by creating a permission scheme that only allows "browse" permission and applying it to all projects. Update your site-wide banners for Jira and Confluence stating that your site is now read-only during the migration.
If you have users continuing to work in the Server products after the migration, be sure to remove this setting after your migration is complete.
Run the production migration
It’s time to bring out the runbook you created and follow the steps and timing you put together to move your data over to Cloud. Refer to our documentation on how to use the Cloud Migration Assistants to run your migration if you’re using this method.
- Using Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate
- Using Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate
If you’re a Bitbucket customer, refer to our Bitbucket migration documentation to carry out your migration.
Migrate any apps
With the app migration pathways you’ve identified, install and migrate the apps you deemed critical for use in Cloud.
QA migrated data
Check to see that your data migrated as expected, and that everything is working properly and in order. Refer step 6 in our testing guide for tips on what to look out for when reviewing your data.
If you run into blockers or need guidance throughout the migration phase, contact our migrations support team for help.
Complete post-migration tasks
- Update product links: After migrating Jira or Confluence to Atlassian cloud, some URLs in the recently migrated products might appear broken as they still point to the old Server or Data Center instances. For instructions, see updating product links after migration.
- Depending on your migration, you may have other post-migration tasks that you will need to complete. Check out important migration tasks during test and after production.
Launch phase
You made it — you can breathe a sigh of relief! With careful planning, preparation, and an all-star team, you’ve successfully migrated to Cloud. Before you celebrate (or take a long vacation), make sure your team receives a warm welcome, they’re setup for Cloud, and your admins feel equipped to manage Cloud responsibilities.
Welcome your team
Communicate to your stakeholders that the migration was successful, why your company decided to make this transition, and re-share what the new status quo looks like. Review our getting started in Cloud documentation (and share it with your team!) to get your users up and running. We recommend sending an email to invite them to your Cloud site and including the key information below:
- New links to bookmark, such as the link to your new Cloud site
- Directions on how end users will log in
- What they’ll need to reset (for example, avatars or, if you’re not using SSO, users will need to reset passwords)
- Changes to apps or functionality
- What training will be provided, and
- Who to contact for help
As a secondary option, you can also invite your users from within your Cloud site.
Adjust to Cloud
To help your team get adjusted, set aside some time to prioritize any post-migration issues, feedback, or questions. Add a few time slots for office hours in the first week after migration to your organization’s calendars, and create a Slack chat room where end users can drop in to ask questions or provide feedback.
If you no longer plan on using your self-managed instance, back up your data for audit purposes if you haven’t already, and feel free to let your maintenance expire.
Implement Cloud security best-practices
Cloud governance also looks a little different than your typical self-managed security setup. Use our best practices, covering identity providers, security protocols, and familiarizing yourself with Atlassian’s role in keeping your data secure, to create a strong foundation for securing your company’s work.
Follow Cloud updates
As a Cloud admin, you’ll want to stay up to date on what’s coming across our Cloud platform and products. Review our Cloud roadmap to see what we’re working on.
Explore our free tools
Assess your apps, explore your migration options, and more with our Cloud migration assistants.