French media company cuts infrastructure costs by 40% with Atlassian Cloud

A leading French media company ran a fragmented Jira Server setup with years of technical debt and inconsistent workflows. We led a complex migration to Atlassian Cloud, consolidating multiple Jira instances into a single, unified platform. The media company now runs on a centralized, scalable system with improved visibility and 40% lower infrastructure costs.

Our work involved

• Atlassian Cloud migration
• Jira implementation assessment
• Jira instance consolidation
• Governance and change management

Impact

The interesting thing about most migration projects, especially those involving Jira, is that “migration” itself is rarely the hardest part. The real work, with all the digging and piecing together, is much closer to an excavation.

One leading French media company’s migration to Atlassian Cloud is one such story. Its newspaper is one of the most widely read in France, and operations span more than 50 local newspaper editions, a major digital news presence, a digital-only evening edition, book publishing, and even a TV channel.

Such rapid growth is bound to create cracks in the technology stack.

CHALLENGE

Years of Jira growth create a fragmented environment

The company was using the on-premises version of Jira to manage operations across its business units. Over time, the system had accumulated technical debt, which started creating visible issues for everyone on the team.

Different business units used Jira differently, with their own configurations and often duplicated workflows. If an employee had to work across multiple teams or units, they didn’t have a consistent process that worked across the board.

The challenges also extended to administrators. Limited visibility and control made even routine changes difficult to implement. Several third-party applications integrated with Jira were no longer supported, introducing additional operational risk.

As Atlassian continued to advance its cloud-first strategy, the company saw an opportunity to modernize its Jira environment, reduce operational costs, and build a more scalable foundation for future growth.

SOLUTION

Turning a migration into a strategic reset

A team of senior Atlassian consultants and a project manager from Modus Create partnered with the company to plan the migration. Together, we broke the project into phases, each designed to tackle a specific challenge.

Phase 1: Understanding the existing Jira environment

Every migration is an audit in disguise. Our priority was to understand the workflows inside the existing Jira Server environment. We examined how teams intended to use Jira and how they had come to use it over time, including its filters, permissions, and third-party applications.

This assessment also presented an opportunity to simplify the Jira environment and remove complexity that had built up over time. Before starting the migration, we mapped dependencies and collaborated closely with the media company, Atlassian, and other providers to ensure the new cloud environment could support all existing requirements—and more.

Phase 2: Rebuilding critical functionality in Atlassian Cloud

Once the migration path was clear, we began reconstructing the Jira ecosystem for Atlassian Cloud.

This was the most delicate part of the project because it involved translating years of operational logic into a platform with a different architecture. We consolidated the two Jira instances into a single Atlassian Cloud environment and took specific measures to solve the company’s existing bottlenecks:

• One shared way of working: The team untangled years of duplicated and inconsistent workflows that had emerged across teams.
• Restoring visibility and control: We redesigned how users, permissions, and access were managed across the environment.
• Preserving data integrity: Critical data, historical records, and dependencies remained intact throughout the migration.
• Reengineering Jira for a cloud-first future: We adapted the environment to Atlassian Cloud's architecture without compromising how teams worked every day.

Some of the heaviest lifting happened behind the scenes. The team rewrote 20,000 Jira filters, directly updated IDs in the database, and re-engineered critical ScriptRunner functionality for the cloud environment.

Exploring an Atlassian Cloud 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 3: Coordinating a complex migration at scale

With the new Atlassian Cloud environment taking shape, the final phase focused on coordinating a rollout, involving dozens of moving pieces without introducing unnecessary disruption.

The project brought together multiple stakeholders, including the media company, Atlassian, and other providers, each with their own dependencies and priorities. To keep the project aligned, we established a governance structure that enabled timely decision-making and close collaboration throughout the migration.

Together, we delivered the work within one-week sprints, iterative development cycles, and continuous feedback loops. Kanban served as a central tool to visualize progress, manage work in progress, and help teams quickly respond to emerging issues.

In addition, we validated each change in a sandbox environment before production rollout, giving teams confidence that critical functionality would behave as expected before it reached 700+ users. From an end user’s perspective, the migration solved their pain points without introducing a slew of UI changes.

IMPACT

40% lower infrastructure costs and more consistent workflows

By consolidating two separate Jira environments into a single Atlassian Cloud instance, the company reduced infrastructure costs by 40%, eliminating duplicate workflows, licensing, and ongoing maintenance overhead. More importantly, the organization moved away from an increasingly fragmented environment and established a centralized platform that could better support collaboration across teams.

The migration also addressed several long-standing operational challenges. The company gained a more consistent way of working, stronger visibility across projects, and improved reporting capabilities. User access and permissions became easier to manage, while the move to Atlassian Cloud strengthened security and aligned the environment with modern cloud standards and evolving GDPR requirements.

Beyond the immediate improvements, the project gave the company a platform designed to evolve with the business. The organization can now onboard new teams more easily without the technical constraints of aging on-premises infrastructure.

A migration project became the operational reset the company needed to move faster, scale more easily, and capitalize on the opportunities emerging in the AI era.