View into a manufacturing hall: a system moves parts along conveyor tracks, light floods in from behind through the gate

Case Study · Mechanical engineering

Atlassian Cloud Migration of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket

FATH ran Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket itself – and paid for every outage: troubleshooting, recovery, staff time. All three systems moved to the Atlassian Cloud in one go, without disrupting daily work. Downtime fell from twelve hours a year to almost none, and operating costs dropped by 80 percent.

Results

99.9%System availability

€200,000 (−80%)Cost savings per year

The Story

For many companies, the cloud is increasingly becoming the preferred choice. It enables cost savings on maintenance, operations and managed infrastructure. Upgrades are much easier to carry out, and – most importantly – it gives teams the flexibility to handle their work in a shared environment.

The Company

FATH is a corporate group headquartered in Spalt with more than 400 employees worldwide. A provider of products and solutions for the industrial shopfloor, automation and digitalization, it has its own production, logistics and sales locations worldwide. Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket are central tools at FATH that directly affect business success – and they are part of the central business intelligence system. Since the team is spread across several countries, it needs a stable system with minimal downtime and constant availability on every platform.

Using a self-managed data center does have advantages over managed SaaS applications. However, the positive effects a company can achieve by using managed SaaS tools can no longer be ignored.

The starting situation

In the past, FATH faced regular system outages (downtimes) of its Atlassian applications hosted on Data Center. With every downtime, the costs for troubleshooting, conducting post-mortem analyses and staff time for system recovery increased.

Since Atlassian is also fully focused on the cloud, many worthwhile improvements are no longer being made to Data Center applications. This increases the risk that certain individual functions can no longer be used.

The day-to-day effort of self-hosted Data Center applications increasingly became a limiting factor in daily business. The advantages of the Atlassian Cloud increasingly came into focus.

FATH is a driver of innovation and repositioned itself in 2021. "Enrich your working life" is one of the guiding principles lived both externally and internally. This creates the expectation that all tools and systems enable users to work effectively and enrich the working life of everyone involved. So it was a logical step for FATH to decide on the migration.

The challenge

Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket were to be migrated at the same time, since they are among the tools FATH's people use daily. This was also meant to avoid further system downtime.

Another requirement from FATH: user workflows should be disrupted as little as possible. That meant the cloud had to be connected to its single sign-on system. Users shouldn't have to switch between the Data Center system and the cloud system during their daily routine.

Info – Marketplace Apps in the Cloud

The functionality of some apps from the Atlassian Marketplace is sometimes severely limited by the cloud, and they lose a large part of their functionality.

Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket are among the most important tools we use every day. It was necessary to migrate all of them at once to make sure our teams wouldn't have to accept any downtime. XALT worked very diligently and drove the migration forward. Necessary changes at Atlassian's end were also handled promptly. An all-round successful project!

Eckard Nees

Director Digitalization at the FATH corporate group

Our Customers Always at the Center, with XALT as Part of the Team

As a first step, the migration team at XALT created a plan in which we documented in detail how and when each step of the migration should be carried out. The project scope was also defined. Our goal was a seamless, smooth transition that wouldn't disrupt users' workflows.

Through daily meetings for close coordination and additional weekly management meetings, we made sure everyone involved was always up to date.

To migrate the Atlassian applications Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket to the cloud, we had to migrate our customer's data from the local instances (Data Center) to the Atlassian Cloud.

The project was carried out at FATH in phases – combining a step-by-step migration with the Optimize-and-Shift method. The migration process included migrating to a sandbox instance to analyze the current status and carry out continuous error analysis. This was followed by fixing errors in the Data Center environment (source), before re-integrating into the sandbox environment in the next step to evaluate the changes and discover new errors.

We repeated these steps until all errors were fixed or communicated. This avoided unwelcome surprises, and we were able to keep all stakeholders proactively informed.

Only once all errors were fixed were all data, workflows and marketplace apps fully migrated to the cloud in a final step, and the system released to FATH's employees.

The migration project's roadmap in Jira: phases 0 to 3 as bars, with Phase 3's completed tasks shown below with status "Done"

Transparency towards the customer

A key part of our approach is to always be transparent with our customers and to ensure customer satisfaction at all times. To do this, we set up a Jira project to give an overview of all tasks and the current project status, and to communicate current tasks or project phases directly to our customer.

We were and still are very satisfied with the Atlassian applications. Migrating to the cloud was therefore the next logical step for us to significantly reduce downtime and costs.

Eckard Nees

Director Digitalization at the FATH corporate group

A long, tall manufacturing hall with steel scaffolding and overhead tracks; on the left a system passes by, blurred into streaks

The Results

The great thing about using cloud-based software solutions is that you can focus entirely on what matters most to your company. Managing and operating your own infrastructure, and making sure everything works as expected – every single day – ties up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.

At FATH, one company goal was to reduce downtime and costs to a minimum. Using the Atlassian Cloud made it possible to achieve the following results:

But costs are only part of the equation. Another challenge was making the systems resilient and flexible, so there would be no serious disruptions for the company. With the Atlassian Cloud, FATH was able to achieve the following:

Summary

FATH successfully migrated its Atlassian tool stack to the cloud to save costs on maintenance, operations and managed infrastructure. The cloud has also made it easier for the team to carry out upgrades, and offers more flexibility when working in a shared environment. System availability was increased (up to 99.9%), operating costs were cut by 80%, and business processes were eased through less downtime. The cloud also offers more security and compliance with GDPR and DSGVO.

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