6 Atlassian Cloud Myths and Truths that Might Surprise You

Some companies, however, are reluctant to migrate to the cloud. Those in highly-regulated industries or from organisations with strict internal security protocols, or attachment to legacy systems, for example, have some valid concerns about genuine potential challenges. However cloud sceptics frequently fall prey to false concerns that are founded on common cloud myths and misconceptions, along with insufficiently developed cloud migration and adoption strategies, which lead them to erroneously believe that cloud won't work for their business.

According to Gartner global end-user spending on Public Cloud Services will exceed $480 Billion in 2022. With reference to the unprecedented circumstances caused by Covid-19 of the last 2 years, Brandon Medford, senior principal analyst at Gartner, says that the most successful organizations "..are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic.” 

It’s clear that those businesses that do not make the move to cloud will be left behind and lose any competitive advantage. So, in this blog we are going to dispel some of the most common cloud migration and adoption myths and perhaps enable the more cloud-sceptic business leaders to revise their opinion, so their business, teams and customers can benefit from the cloud.

Cloud Myth #1 | “Cloud just isn’t secure enough”

We sometimes hear from clients that one of their biggest concerns when considering a move to cloud is a perceived inability to meet compliance and security requirements - particularly when shifting the compliance and data security responsibilities to a third party cloud provider. This has put cloud migration goals on hold for some organisations.

It is certainly true that many businesses rushed their cloud adoption during the Covid-19 pandemic, often at the expense of proper configuration and permissions security measures. The Cybersecurity Insiders and Fortinet Cloud Security Report 2021 shows that misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest cloud security risk, according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals. This is followed by exfiltration of sensitive data (59%) and tying at 49% are unauthorized access and insecure interfaces/APIs. However, understanding from the outset that these are the potential challenges and adopting measures to combat these pitfalls before they arise, is half the battle. When you start to examine cloud plans provided by proven and trusted leaders, such as Atlassian's Cloud offering, and you work with a certified Atlassian Partner, you'll see that your business and customers can significantly benefit. Security performance can even be greatly enhanced, because the best of these providers, such as Atlassian, are highly focused on cloud security and have embedded security into the architecture of their cloud solution and made it a priority at every step.

• Features in Atlassian Access, such as streamlined security and centralised administration with SAML SSO, automated user provisioning, permissions, Active Directory sync, authentication and the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) make it easy to enhance your security measures and meet and even excel your security requirements.
• Marketplace apps like Jira Software Cloud, Jira Service Management, Jira Align, Bitbucket, Trello and Confluence Cloud provide a secure platform for smoother and safer business communications among end users.
• 48% of in-house developers say they don’t have enough time to spend on security. As part of Atlassian Cloud, however, customers receive the benefits of Atlassian's rigorous testing, disaster recovery plans and encryption in transit, amongst other best practises, making it easy to make security a priority.
• Beyond that, Sandbox and release tracks in Cloud Premium ensure that Atlassian's security is always up-to-date and ahead of the curve.

Cloud Myth #2 | “Migrating to cloud might damage our business performance”

There are few things that make IT and software development teams more frustrated than ill-performing tools. Not only can it cost significant money, but it can result in a loss of IT productivity, unhappy teams and even negatively impact your customer experience (CX).

Atlassian premium cloud products are engineered to minimize downtime through their multi-level redundancy infrastructure, guaranteed availability, enterprise-grade security, disaster recovery programs and solid quality control throughout the development roadmap using SOC2, ISO 27002 and ISO 22301 standards and practises.

• 76% of enterprise Jira Software customers say they shipped projects faster after upgrades and moving to Confluence cloud.
• 99.95% uptime SLA is financially guaranteed with Jira and Confluence Cloud Enterprise plans, ensuring that your team's work on critical projects will not be interrupted.
• And aiding in responsiveness, Atlassian Opsgenie software is the fastest growing solution for incident management, and Atlassian Statuspage makes it easy to communicate real-time updates to users.

Regarding its commitment to business performance, Atlassian says, "We continuously look for ways to improve product and platform performance by monitoring key performance metrics, such as load times, search responsiveness, and attachments. We've also reduced latency for customers around the world by hosting our cloud infrastructure in six distinct geographic regions."

Cloud Myth #3 | “We will lose control if we move to Cloud”

Sometimes, reluctance to move to the cloud stems from a reluctance to change. But in business and in the wider world today, change is the only constant. Migration to the cloud is a large undertaking and understandably, some businesses are concerned about whether they’ll be able to control their changes, manage risks and keep their data safe. Nevertheless, the reliability; product and data safeguards; and quality controls of a top-notch, proven, global provider’s cloud solution will out-class any system that can be accomplished internally.

In reality, a lot of companies currently have an IT approval system that is extremely complex and time consuming - and as a result hinders real progress in performance. The Atlassian Cloud platform, on the other hand, enables greater agility and improves DevOps and DevSecOps ways of working, enabling IT teams and organisations to reach the next level in terms of innovation, quality and speed to market. Rather than waiting for an update once every six months, quick bug fixes and improvements are continuously rolled out. Choosing the right cloud solution empowers teams to focus their time on providing value to your customers through your core offerings.

Cloud Myth #4 | “As a Systems Administrator, my job might be at risk if we move to the Cloud”

It’s true that moving to Atlassian Cloud can radically change your job role, however, learning how to manage and migrate to the cloud is an important and necessary skill in IT today. Fortunately, the sooner you embrace the cloud, the more relevant your skillset will be as you progress in your career. Think of it as an evolution that is on track with the future state.

Instead of dealing with internal IT tickets, audit logs, bugs or admin requests, after migrating to the cloud, you can expect to be researching and recommending new apps and integrations to boost productivity, learning what features users want to add, and finding new ways to automate internal processes to improve speed and overall customer satisfaction.

Cloud Myth #5 | “Atlassian Cloud is only suited to small teams”

Though traditionally small and agile teams were early adopters of cloud storage and technologies, large enterprises have soon caught up. In fact, did you know 80% of the Fortune 500 have an Atlassian Cloud licence? As reported recently in Forbes, Atlassian has more than 170,000 customers with 10 million monthly active users.

One of the key advantages of Atlassian Cloud is that it’s built to scale with your business and to keep up with your changing demands, regardless of the size of your organization. Ultimately, cloud technology has progressed to not only support the complexity of the largest enterprises, but also to help simplify them. The purpose-built Atlassian Cloud for Enterprise, is more scalable and secure and flexible than ever before, providing you with greater control and the ability to innovate more rapidly with improved collaboration, automation and intelligent workflows.

Atlassian holds and maintains a multitude of compliance certifications for working with highly-regulated and high-security organisations, including SOC, GDPR, CSA, PCI DSS, VPAT, FedRAMP, and ISO 27001 and 27028.

Cloud Myth #6 | “The customised workflows my team builds are best for my business”

If you have spent significant time and resources trying to create effective systems and workflows, it may seem counterintuitive to consider moving to the cloud or teams may be attached to current workflows out of habit, even if they aren't really optimal. You may question if a vendor can meet your teams’ unique demands.

However, many people are surprised to learn that Atlassian Cloud is really flexible and customizable – you’ll be able to do everything in the cloud that you can on your server. Features like on-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling and rapid elasticity offer even more flexibility, greater accessibility and potential cost savings. If you would like to know more about the benefits that Atlassian Cloud could bring, download our white paper 5 reasons to move to Atlassian Cloud. 

As Atlassian so succinctly puts it, "for agile and DevOps teams, cloud computing provides the ability to simplify and accelerate the development process" and this in turn enables cloud first businesses to gain the competitive advantage. 

It's easiest with an Atlassian Solution Partner at your side

As an Atlassian solution partner, Catapult CX can help customise your cloud to integrate complex workflows and tailor the platform to achieve your particular business goals so contact one of our experts today on +44 203 457 1374.