For many companies, the cloud is increasingly becoming the preferred choice. It provides cost savings in maintenance, operations and managed infrastructure. Upgrades are much easier to perform and, most importantly, it gives teams the flexibility to manage their work in a shared environment.
FATH is a group of companies headquartered in Spalt and employs 400+ people worldwide. The provider of products and solutions for the industrial store floor, automation and digitization has its own production, logistics and sales locations worldwide. Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket are used at FATH central tools that have a direct impact on 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.
The use of a self-managed data center does have advantages over managed SaaS applications. However, the positive effects that a company can achieve by using managed SaaS tools can no longer be ignored.
FATH has historically experienced regular downtime of its data center-hosted Atlassian applications. With each downtime, the cost of troubleshooting, performing post-mortem analysis, and staffing for system recovery increased.
Since Atlassian is also focusing fully on the cloud, many sensible adaptations in data center applications are no longer carried out. This increases the risk that certain individual functions can no longer be used.
The daily effort of self-hosted data center applications became more and more a limiting factor in the daily business. The advantages of the Atlassian Cloud increasingly came into focus.
FATH is an innovation driver and has repositioned itself in 2021. "Enrich your working life" is one of the guiding principles that is lived out externally and internally. From this follows the claim 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 opt for migration.
The functionality of some apps from the Atlassian Marketplace are sometimes severely limited by the cloud and lose a large part of their functionality.
Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket should be migrated at the same time, as they are among the tools used daily at FATH. This should also avoid further downtime of the systems.
Another requirement of FATH: The users' workflows must not be impaired as far as possible. Therefore, the cloud had to be connected to its single-sing-on system. Users should not have to switch between the data center system and the cloud system during their daily routine.
As a first step, the migration team at XALT a plan in which we set out in detail how and when each step of the migration was to be carried out. We also defined the scope of the project. Our goal was to achieve a seamless and smooth transition that would not disrupt user workflows.
Through daily meetings for close coordination and additional weekly management meetings, we ensured that everyone involved was up to date at all times.
In order to migrate the Atlassian applications Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket to the cloud, we had to migrate our client's data from the local instances (data center) to the Atlassian cloud.
The project was launched at FATH performed in phases - using a combination of a step-by-step migration and the optimize-and-shift method. The migration process included migration to a sandbox instance to analyze the current status and perform continuous error analysis. This is followed by troubleshooting in the data center environment (source) to perform a reintegration into the sandbox environment in the next step, evaluating the changes and discovering new errors.
We repeated these steps until all errors had been corrected or communicated. This avoided unpleasant surprises and allowed us to proactively inform all stakeholders.
Only when all errors were fixed, all data, workflows and Marketplace Apps were completely migrated to the cloud in a final step and the system was released to the FATH employees.
An essential part of our approach is to be transparent with our customers at all times and to ensure that customer satisfaction is maintained at all times. To this end, we set up a Jira project to provide an overview of all tasks and the current project status and to communicate current tasks or project phases to our customers in a targeted manner.
The great thing about using cloud-based software solutions is that you can fully concentrate on what matters most for your company. Managing and running your own infrastructure and making sure that everything works as expected - every day - consumes valuable resources that can be used elsewhere.
At Fath, one business goal was to reduce downtimes, and costs to a minimum. Using the Atlassian Cloud their results have been striking:
Yet, costs are only part of the equation. Another main challenge was to make the service resilient and flexible so there would be no more severe impact on their Business. Using the Atlassian Cloud they achieved the following:
Fath successfully migrated its Atlassian toolstack to the cloud to save on maintenance, operations and managed infrastructure costs. The cloud has also enabled the team to perform upgrades more easily and provides more flexibility to work in a shared environment. It has increased system availability (up to 99.9 %), reduced operating costs by 80 % and eased the burden on business processes by reducing downtime. In addition, the cloud provides greater security and compliance with GDPR and DSGVO.
Would you like more information or would you like a customized solution? We support you in getting the best out of your business. Feel free to contact us by phone, email or visit us in our office.
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