Digital trust company boosts operational efficiency with Atlassian Cloud

A leading digital trust company had outgrown its on-prem Atlassian environment, where legacy systems, data silos, and rising maintenance costs were slowing teams down. We helped the team migrate Jira and Confluence to Atlassian Cloud, carefully merging data and addressing system dependencies along the way. By successfully moving to Atlassian Cloud, the company now has a more secure collaboration space with significantly lower maintenance time.

Our work involved

• Atlassian Cloud migration
• Jira and Confluence instance consolidation
• Governance and change management
• Documentation and post-migration support

Impact

Most cloud migrations are exercises in modernization. For a digital trust company, though, they also become a question of credibility.

A digital trust leader in France understood this reality well. The company helps more than 60,000 organizations manage identities, signatures, and sensitive data every day.

So when the company faced the challenge of moving 6,500 users to Atlassian Cloud, the stakes were higher. Years of institutional knowledge, critical business processes, and stringent security requirements all had to move together without disrupting daily operations. The company approached its Atlassian Cloud migration with the same standards of trust and reliability that define its business.

Challenge

On-premises infrastructure creates unnecessary overhead

The company had built a substantial Atlassian footprint with on-premises versions of Jira and Confluence, alongside critical add-ons such as Team Calendars and PlantUML. The platforms were central to how teams worked, but the infrastructure itself had become expensive to maintain and scale. There were a few reasons for this:

• Fragmented environments: Teams were working across disconnected systems, creating information silos and inconsistent access to data. They were spending unnecessary time navigating between tools instead of moving work forward.
• Growing infrastructure burden: Server management, upgrades, security patches, and ongoing maintenance consumed valuable IT resources.
• End of support for Data Center: Atlassian's cloud-first roadmap and the approaching end of support for Jira Data Center added to the urgency.

The company was already using Atlassian Cloud for a few workflows. However, the majority of its projects and knowledge remained in the on-premises version. It now had to plan a complete transition to Atlassian Cloud, and do so with zero disruption to its routine operations.

Solution

A phased approach to de-risking migration

Modus Create’s experts joined the company to help migrate Jira and Confluence from the on-premises version to Atlassian Cloud. Working together as one team, we took a phased approach to the migration instead of a simple lift-and-shift operation.

Phase 1: Mapping years of institutional knowledge

We began by reviewing the company’s existing workflows, applications, data relationships, and system dependencies. This helped the team identify what could be migrated cleanly and which areas carried the greatest risk of data corruption.

This audit helped shape the overall migration strategy. We developed a testing approach to retain historical records and accurately merge legacy data with existing cloud data. This was non-negotiable for the company. The goal was to create a single, consistent data environment that would improve reporting, collaboration, and operational efficiency.

If you're evaluating a similar migration, our Atlassian Data Center to Cloud migration FAQ covers the 10 most common questions we hear from organizations at this stage — from migration timing to marketplace app compatibility.

Phase 2: Building confidence before rollout

Once the migration path was clear, the company turned its attention to using sandbox environments to validate the migration of Jira and Confluence before rollout.

These environments allowed us to test application behavior and confirm that critical information remained intact. Instead of treating testing as a final checkpoint, the team made it part of the operating rhythm of the project. The company’s users gained familiarity with the future environment while the migration team found a practical way to detect issues before they reached production.

Phase 3: Solving for hidden complexity

As the project progressed, the team uncovered several technical challenges that rarely appear during planning but often determine whether a migration succeeds or stalls:

• SSL certificates on the Jira and Confluence servers: The team had installed servers using Docker images and had to reconfigure the YAML compose files for each instance and stabilize the environment before the migration could proceed reliably.
• Application compatibility challenges: Some Confluence apps had no direct equivalent in Atlassian Cloud, which meant the team had to identify alternative applications capable of providing similar functionality and then handle the conversion work.
• Production data problems from licensing issues: Certain application licenses affected data integrity, and the team had to coordinate with Atlassian and application support teams to re-enable licenses and recover the affected information.
• Content migration complications: Some images did not migrate properly into Confluence Cloud and required database-level refreshes from Atlassian. Numbered headings in Confluence also required manual intervention and data recovery.
• Complexity in the networking environment: The company needed commits and branches to continue appearing correctly inside Jira Cloud, which required the creation of an application tunnel between Jira and Confluence.

Any of the above challenges, if left unresolved, would have created major issues after the migration. By addressing them before the cutoff, the company entered the final migration phase with a stable environment and high odds of success.

Phase 4: Moving to Atlassian Cloud

The team scheduled production migration over a weekend to avoid any disruption for users. We then backed the official rollout with a communication and change management plan, so teams understood what was changing and how they would be supported after migration.

Once the migration went live, the team finalized documentation and supported the company throughout the adoption period. By then, the measure of success had shifted from completing the migration to ensuring the new environment performed reliably under everyday use.

Impact

Less maintenance, more room to scale

The migration gave the company a more scalable, secure, and collaborative Atlassian environment while lowering overall maintenance costs. System maintenance time fell by almost 40%, as cloud infrastructure reduced the manual work tied to running an on-premises server. The company now works in a more unified environment, with faster decision-making, stronger reporting, and fewer delays caused by fragmented systems.

Moving to Atlassian Cloud also changed the organization's relationship with technology. Instead of maintaining systems that were gradually becoming a constraint, the company now operates on a platform that scales alongside the business. It can adopt new capabilities, including AI-powered features or future integrations, without the limitations of legacy infrastructure.

For a digital trust leader, that is the larger story. They modernized a critical internal platform in a way that reflected the same standards of trust its customers expect. Its workflows and data are as secure as ever before, and built on a foundation ready for both resilience and scale.