A long-time catworkx customer, Oetiker approached catworkx in March 2021 with the desire to move its OnPremise instances to the Atlassian Cloud to simplify administration processes and modernize its setup. It was primarily for strategic reasons that Oetiker wanted to rely more on SaaS solutions, because they no longer wanted to administer the tools themselves. The company’s previous instances were installed locally on a single server, and maintenance took up a lot of resources internally. In the meantime there were performance problems with the “historically grown setup” and updates were needed to get up to date. There was also a need for action regarding the reverse proxy server used, which was no longer being developed further by the manufacturer. A redesign of the system landscape was urgently overdue. Needed 100 users for Jira software, 250 for Confluence.
The requirements
Oetiker’s main requirement was to migrate the existing setup to the cloud in a timely manner. Also of importance was the increase in the number of users and the expansion of applications already implemented on the server but still experimental, such as the reservation of machines and test equipment via Jira tickets.
Inventory & Migration Assessment
catworkx started at the beginning of 2021 – together with Oetiker’s IT management – with an inventory of the current environment. The kick-off meeting for the cloud migration was held in March 2021. A smart assessment was used to ask what goals Oetiker would like to achieve by switching to the cloud, what the setup looks like today, and what it should look like tomorrow. Further expansion requirements and technical prerequisites were also inquired about. In addition: Which products does the company want to migrate and what are the requirements in terms of security, legal, compliance and data protection. What timeframe does the company foresee and can some data be migrated now or later. The results from this round provided the necessary actions and timeline to successfully go through the cloud migration: A roadmap for the cloud migration was created.
Workshops followed with the management and the responsible employees who work with the system. After the workshop phase, the results were summarized and the migration concept was created. This included the following items:
- A comparison of on-premise maintenance requirements with Atlassian’s cloud offering in the selected plan.
- Pointing out changes in terms of standard functionality in the cloud
- Identifying the necessary adjustments of processes, automation as well as functions
- The description of the changes in the functionality of apps, if any
- A proposal for decision making
Successful test – and 1:1 migration of Jira software and Confluence
Next up was the test migration. A test migration has the advantage that the employees can first test the new environment at their leisure and thus get used to the cloud. Oetiker’s employees had a total of two weeks to test the new system and put it through its paces before the productive, final migration was due: In one day, all of Oetiker’s content was migrated 1:1 from Jira Software and Confluence to the cloud. This had the positive effect that in the course of time after that, the number of users of the applications went up significantly. Another advantage: Problems during operation, such as isolated failures or necessary restarts of the instances, were now eliminated. A new solution for internal resource planning based on the BigPicture extension was also put into operation.
Conclusion
The migration of Jira software and Confluence to the cloud not only brought the company a higher level of IT security overall, but also improved usability. Thus, applications are now more accessible and, above all, more stable and can be used with mobile apps without any problems. While the tools were previously only used on a small scale by individual teams (in Switzerland) in the organization, the cloud migration succeeded in expanding their use to additional organizational units and countries.
