When Atlassian announced that Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket server products were being End-of-Life’d in late 2020, the community of companies employing it was sent reeling. Cloud Migration just became vital, and for many of these companies, the Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket Server was a keystone of their organization’s work and document management. It’s time to up-root it from its firmly entrenched spot in their server rooms. Great. It wasn’t all doom-and-gloom as it turns out, (questionable pandemic-related timing aside). Atlassian followed up their server-death announcement with a few great ways of approaching a cloud migration from their existing servers. We’ve compiled a few of the options, many of which can work together to achieve a relatively painless cloud migration.
Cloud Migration Free Trial
If you still have a decent length of time left on your existing server license, Atlassian offers a way to cushion the blow by way of a
free migration trial. They’ll match your server user tier and grant a cloud instance for your existing products to run in tandem with your server for the length of time it has remaining on its licence (up to 12 months).
 This can be a great way to try out your new cloud environments and even start your migration process if your organization is ready. Just make sure that you sign up with an URL you’d like to keep for the long run; changing this later will be a pain if and when you decide to commit to your cloud upgrade.
Selecting a Solution Partner To Assist
If you don’t have an experienced Atlassian team at your organization (like most organizations), it can be difficult to justify taking the time to chart your own course through a Cloud Migration. Bearing in mind that this isn’t the kind of scenario that’s likely to repeat itself, seeking out an Atlassian Solution Partner (*cough* like
Avant) is possibly the least disruptive way to make sure your server data gets moved over quickly and intact, without wasting too much time on the part of your organization’s IT staff.
 Solution Partners have expertise that comes directly from Atlassian for product management and even the most complex of server migration scenarios. If you’re looking for help to get your cloud migration dealt with,
we’d love to hear from you.Jira/Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant
Finally, to help the ~120,000 some organizations across the world make their moves to cloud, Atlassian offers a few free tools to get the job done. Jira and Confluence Servers offer a Cloud Migration Assistant Application that aims to facilitate getting your data into a movable, import-friendly state for a cloud environment.
 We’re sure the intention was noble with this one, but let’s be fair. if you’re relying on any marketplace apps or other customization in your instances, these tools might not be terribly useful to your cloud migration situation. Atlassian has a section on their
cloud migrations page dedicated to these tools and the laundry-list of limitations they carry.
 If you need to move Bitbucket to Cloud, this doesn’t yet have any Atlassian tools available, making the process for this application very much a manual one. These methods (admittedly) aren’t fully fleshed out for all situations, necessitating solution partner, and sometimes Atlassian TAM assistance to take on. If your merging scenario is a complicated one or if you have a high number of users, the cloud migrations page we mentioned above highlights that it might be best to enlist a
Solution Partner to help you through your cloud migration. Avant has a cloud complexity assessment available to show where your organization might fit, and even a suggested approach free of charge.
 
