Client was migrating all on-premise services into cloud/SaaS versions to support a change in internal IT Strategy, and re-org reducing IT headcount.  The Atlassian JIRA product was to be maintained, although utilizing the “on demand” cloud version.

Primary objective was to migrate new projects into the cloud version, whilst maintaining legacy/historical projects in the on-premise version as read-only.  As the project progressed we strategized that migrating the historical projects into the cloud was the best fit, as the on-premise version could be fully deprecated and no additional costs would be incurred with the cloud platform.

Primary challenges were caused by the on-premise version of JIRA being nearly two full revisions behind the cloud version.  With marginal downtime, due to near 24×7 operations, we had to provision a same version of the on-premise server in parallel to the production version, and migrate data and perform several staged upgrades.  Negotiations with Atlassian enabled us to source temporary maintenance licenses to allow the upgrade before migrating to the cloud.

Secondary challenges occurred due to shifting timelines with the client for availability to deploy, caused by client backlog of project sprints, compounded by migration bugs encountered during the initial window.  An open and clear dialogue was maintained with the client highlight on-potential complications with delayed dates with the primary risk involved with revision drift from the on-premise JIRA server and the Atlassian Cloud, as well as on-going internal JIRA plug-in development and integrations.