Planning for any software’s end of life seems like a complex process, but it needn’t be if the organisation has enough warning and a solid plan in place. When the software vendor issues an end-of-support date, one of two things happen. Either a migration to a new version of the software is necessary or completely new software needs to be installed. Either way, a fair amount of investment is needed when it comes to changing business processes and moving data to a new platform.

With this in mind, Obsidian Systems recently held a webinar entitled “Atlassian end of life: risks, dangers and what are your options?”, to share some insights in terms of Atlassian’s end of life and how to manage it.

A smarter approach

Kicking off the conversation, Obsidian Systems chief product officer Tania van Wyk de Vries said: “We believe in a ‘smarter’ approach, which stands for strategy, mapping, analyse, recommend, translate, execute and reflect when we approach any migrations with our customers. We look at the strategy and goals and also help them determine if cloud or data centre is the best option for them to migrate to. We aim to align, enable and optimise.”

She said when it comes to organisations with multiple teams, it’s often difficult to visualise work across those different areas. Aligning the work of these teams enables them to work toward shared goals and is the cornerstone of any successful project.

To watch the webinar, go to youtu.be/Khq07SnhUl0

“Atlassian helped by improving and empowering teams to work more effectively, streamline their ways of work so that they make business changes more rapidly and accelerate continuous improvement. It helps with streamlining workflows, assigning tasks, using all the reporting on the stack to monitor progress, and leverage any of the knowledge management systems and practices.”

Planning ahead is key

Next on the agenda, team Lead for Atlassian at Obsidian Systems Nick Holdstock said the first question everyone asks is what “server end of support” means. “It basically means Atlassian, and all the marketplace partners, will no longer support several products from 15 February 2024. This includes the plugins, and obviously, all the main Jira products on server.”

Anyone who hasn’t migrated to the cloud by that point will no longer receive technical support, bug fixes or security updates. “We recommended that all users start planning for their migrations as soon as possible and get moved over to the cloud,” he advised.

He says being prepared is key, and Obsidian is seeing an uplift in people starting to migrate. “People needn’t panic. Some migrations can take a few basic weeks, and the more complex migrations can take a few months. The important thing is having a plan in place.”

Atlassian options

Holdstock says Atlassian said customers who purchase an annual cloud subscription before the 15 February next year will continue to receive support for up to one additional year. “However, this is with the caveat that in order to be eligible, it must be an annual subscription that is purchased on this cloud, and it also needs to be a minimum of 1 001 Jira Software uses or a minimum of 251 service desk agents.”

Speaking of how best to approach such a migration, he said the first step in the process is to complete an audit of the current landscape, documenting the current list of products, versions, configurations, any third-party add-ons and suchlike.

“Take a holistic view of what the current environment looks like, and I would also suggest conducting a bit of a deep dive into the add-ons that you have, as these aren’t automatically migrated. At this stage, it’s also important to check with security teams that Atlassian cloud meets all the security requirements because this isn’t something that should be done at the last minute.

“If you haven’t already done so, at this stage go to atlassian.com and start a free cloud trial. It’s as simple as logging in, clicking on ‘trial’, and following the steps. Once you’ve done that you can play around with the cloud site and have a look at the various features. Start looking around at how to configure the cloud in a way that enables you to manage users and security.”

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Test, and test some more

Next is the prepping stage, where it’s time to prep your team, environments and of course all the company’s data for the big migration. Following this comes testing. At this stage, you can test out your production migration using a Cloud migration trial to make sure everything is in order.

He says Atlassian has a testing guide to walk users through its recommended testing steps.

“Also, backing up the company’s data is obviously important, even though when a business migrates from server to cloud, no data is changed on the server environment. It is particularly important if you are migrating to an existing cloud site that has production data. It’s good practice in case anything goes wrong with the migration to backup any cloud instances.”

Once the testing phase is done, it’s time to migrate. In this phase, you will resolve any last-minute issues, run the production migration, and move all users and data.

“While moving over from server to basic cloud is daunting for some, as each entity is a different size, has different requirements, and faces different challenges. But it needn’t be. With proper planning, it’s a seamless and painless process,” Holdstock said.