What is Atlassian Cloud Enterprise and what to expect from it?

After Atlassian announced the end of life of the Server option, customers are facing now the dilemma to opt for either: Data Center or Cloud, and as an option regarding this dilemma, Atlassian has expanded their Cloud proposal to four different plans adapted to each team needs, especially the one we will cover on this blog post; we are going to answer what is Atlassian Cloud Enterprise.

What is Atlassian Cloud Enterprise? Who gets the real benefit from it? Which are the scalation and security options? How to empower the products to get the most out of them? Is it really going to be positive for the productivity of your teams?... these are common questions people ask themself when standing in front of the dilemma of cloud migrations, and those are the topics we will be going over in this blog post.

Atlassian Cloud Enterprise is available for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management, where 95% of orders come from new customers and where current customers are every day choosing to transition to the Cloud.

One of the reasons Atlassian and DEISER customers opt for Cloud, specifically for Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, is the benefits of on-demand scalability; unlike local systems, Cloud offers enough resources to automatically scale and adapt to new users they are added.

On the other hand, other Atlassian customers opt for Data Center, alleging that most of their product customizations and Atlassian Marketplace app functionalities are unavailable in the Cloud. However, it is a matter of time Cloud will solve these pains: product customizations with Atlassian Forge and the Atlassian Marketplace apps functionalities matching them in the Cloud; it's already happening, as is the case with Projectrak and Exporter for Jira.

The Atlassian Cloud Enterprise infrastructure is mainly designed to respond quickly to sudden and massive fluctuations in business environments. Let's go through it in detail:

Which types of Atlassian Cloud plans exist?

Atlassian Cloud offers four plans where Enterprise is the most advanced compared to the Free version, which is destined for small teams, the Standard plan is for growing teams, then the Premium plan, which is designed for organizations with the need to scale and collaborate better, and finally, the Enterprise offering...

What is Atlassian Cloud Enterprise?

The Atlassian Cloud Enterprise plan is designed for companies on a global scale, with specific security, compliance, and governance needs.

Overall, Atlassian Cloud Enterprise helps companies in the following:

•    It's a system designed to mirror the company structure in the software.
  
  
•    It helps them standardize the Atlassian products on a single cloud platform designed to scale profitably, enabling teams to customize it to their needs and support complex business needs, such as organizational autonomy, data segregation, and environment customization.
  
  
•    It allows better provision and control of multiple instances for separate business units, maintaining data residency in specific regions for compliance matters, customizing the products based on project configurations, Atlassian Marketplace apps, and more.
  
  
•    It grants access to a central place to manage users across all Atlassian products, enforce security policies, obtain usage information, and manage billing.
  
  
•    The licensing model is per user; this model allows users to access all business instances of a tool with a single license.
  
  
•    It also allows you to test and control the implementation of product configuration changes to end-users, enabling you to apply adequate change management practices.
  
  
•    It makes work faster and more flexible while giving system administrators the ability to keep products centralized to maintain security and compliance throughout the whole organization.
  
  
•    It guarantees the highest uptime, with a financially backed 99.95% SLA, which is equivalent to a maximum of 21 minutes of downtime per month.

Key benefits of Atlassian Cloud Enterprise

Perhaps not all companies are ready to migrate for multiple reasons, but the Atlassian Cloud Enterprise offering is attractive; that's a fact. In addition to the review of the benefits aforementioned, Cloud Enterprise offers even more:

Atlassian Cloud for Enterprises scales globally, secure, with unlimited Instances

This option promises greater security, control, and flexibility designed especially for those global organizations. That's why we're getting a bit more in-depth regarding the benefits this plan offers in terms of scalability, its limitations, and how reliable it is:

1. One plan, many instances: Increase the limit of users per instance as you go

Migrating to Cloud Enterprise and increasing the limit of instances and users per instance just because makes no sense and it's not of much use if your products are not supported on this plan, or if your apps don't work properly, or even if those are missing functionalities compared to Data Center. It's important to evaluate first. Another way it could be disastrous.

After the proper evaluation and migration, Atlassian Cloud for Enterprises supports your scalation by guaranteeing a 99.95% uptime SLA, which translates to less than 21 minutes of downtime per month. That's quite enough availability if you ask us. The real-time statuses of overall Atlassian Cloud products are always published on their status page, so you stay informed about system availability and performance at all times.

Additionally, it offers centralized user licenses that allow paying for a user once access is granted to them to unlimited instances. With other Atlassian cloud plans, you need to purchase a separate license for each additional instance. The cost of a single Enterprise seat can be substantially less than that of two Premium seats.

In addition to the offer of unlimited instances, Atlassian continues increasing the limit per user on a single instance. In fact, they were running an early access program for 20,000 users per instance, which is already available, and this limit is intended to be increased to 35,000 users per instance in 2022. Here you can check the cloud roadmap of this and other initiatives.

This is great, but why would you want to have multiple instances? Basically, we can give you two (even three) fundamental reasons, but here goes two:

1. Organizational autonomy: You can have separate product instances for independent regional teams, business teams (Human Resources, Marketing, Finance, IT ...), or acquired entities. Having several instances allows each of these teams to have total autonomy within their IT systems.
   
   
2. User experience (UX): This benefit allows you to adapt the UX to each team's specific needs. Some superusers may require more custom fields or workflows. This separation between users in a new instance keeps the user experience simple for everyone, which is one of the main goals of the software.

2. Centralize the administration of all your Jira instances

Atlassian Cloud Enterprise offers multiple centralized governance controls for change management and users at scale. And what does this mean? Offering resources to administrators who organize tools within an organization so that they can centrally control how employees use Atlassian products, as well as control the change management strategy.

This option ensures global monitoring, through a built-in centralized management console, without the need to invest in custom dashboards. Administrators can manage users and billing, configure services, and get usage statistics from one location. It is also possible to maintain security compliance for product instances across the whole organization of the enterprise.

Which resources do administrators have at the organizational level?

•    Centralized administration center where administrators can assign users to multiple product instances, manage access permissions, customize instances with specific marketplace applications or workflows, apply security policies, and check usage and billing.
  
  
•    Automated user provisioning and de-provisioning with built-in integrations to leading identity providers, saving administrators time and hassle.
  
  
•    Analysis of the organization's information allows for tracking the usage and making decisions based on data to increase the adoption of other tools.
  
  
•    Sandbox is a safe and isolated environment where production data can be cloned, and upcoming changes can be tested before releasing them into the production environment.
  
  
•    Release Tracks allows administrators to batch release to the production environment in a fixed period of time to have enough time to document it and prepare it for end-users.

3. Atlassian Cloud Enterprise is secure, compliant, and reliable

Security is an essential component of Atlassian Cloud products. It offers built-in tools to meet data privacy obligations worldwide and protect user accounts to minimize data breaches.
For example, data protection and segregation are some of the most significant concerns when using cloud systems. Administrators may want to configure separate instances for specific teams, such as finance, HR, or legal departments, who deal with confidential data that cannot be exposed to everyone inside and outside the company. With Atlassian Cloud, it is possible to set up separate instances for external partner teams.

Breaking down into the details, the guarantee to back their word on cloud security, Atlassian supports the cloud with the following series of certifications and procedures:

•    The most relevant compliance certifications, such as Systems and Organization Controls (SOC-2, SOC-3), Information Security Management Systems (ISO / IEC 27001), Protection of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in public clouds (ISO / IEC 27018), the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT 508), compliance with the Payment Card Industries Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), specific to industries such as the HIPAA, and of course, the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.
  
  
•    Offering encryption in transit and in storage.
  
  
•    The long-awaited Data Residency can pin data to the United States or the European Union region with plans to expand support to additional regions, such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India.
  
  
•    Plus, at no additional cost, this option includes Atlassian access features such as SAML-based single sign-on (SSO), organization audit logs to classify anomalous activities, Active Directory sync with Okta, Azure, OneLogin, and more, mandatory two-step verification, API token controls to view and manage API access, authentication policies to customize settings based on users, and security integrations (CASB) to monitor suspicious activity.

4. The possibilities to enhance and customize Atlassian products are wide

The Atlassian Cloud computing offering for enterprises also allows users to customize environments according to their needs: configuring instances with specific Atlassian Marketplace apps or creating a specific set of project configurations. It can be achieved using Forge. As well

Atlassian is working alongside the creators of the most popular apps to ensure they offer the same functionalities, support, security, and reliability that you expect from the tools in other cloud hosting types.