How did we migrate Synbase’s Atlassian environments to Cloud solution?

NB! Please note that Atlassian products are developed rapidly. The product features listed in the article may change over time.

Changes in regulations applied to organizations can often result in rearrangements in solutions that support the work processes.

With this case study Elise Urva, the product owner in Synbase will give us an insight into their development processes and decision to move to Atlassian Cloud. Furthermore, our system administrator Sven Pärtel explains how he carried out the migration process. 

Medical devices’ regulations require data hosting in a private, company managed environment. 

Synbase is a company that connects the latest knowledge from evidence-based and updated databases to a comfortable full service used by doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.

Today Synbase is using different tools to support development processes and teamwork: Jira Software for tickets and backlog and Confluence for development documentation.

In addition, they use different plugins that connect with Atlassian products: draw.io for user stories and process descriptions, Balsamiq for prototypes and Slack for team chat.  

„A big favorite is Atlassian and Slack integration. All information is in one place so there is no need for other channels,” says Synbase’s product owner Elise.

Until the maintenance phase, work related to Synbase’s development process was hosted in TWN’s Atlassian environment, but in the long run, the shared environments would not meet the requirements. 

„Synbase’s product portfolio includes an API service that needs to meet the requirements for medical devices and classifies as a medical device. The prerequisite is that the technical documentation is hosted in the company’s environment. As our documentation and development backlog was hosted in TWN’s Data Center platform, we needed to migrate to our own Atlassian instance.“

Considering Synbase’s Atlassian products’ user tier and the fact that they do not handle confidential personal data we agreed that Atlassian Cloud would be the best option.

Preliminary work and Atlassian expert’s experience are the foundations for a successful migration

Data migration started with organizing the environments that were previously used.

„Many Confluence spaces were created in the past, but were not in use and some data was duplicated; we could delete and put them in order,“ Elise says. 

As a result of organizing the data our system administrator Sven Pärtel got the necessary input to continue with the migration process. 

„For migrating Jira projects I used the Cloud Migration plugin. It needs to be taken into account that it is not yet possible to migrate custom fields with this plugin, which is why they need to be manually configured and imported from the CSV file,“ says Sven and adds, that it is not always possible to migrate Data Center plugins’ data to Cloud.

Sven exported Confluence spaces as an XML file and then uploaded to Synbase’s environment. According to the system administrator, as with both Jira and Confluence it is very important to check the permission schemes. 

In addition, Sven created application links to allow access to certain resources and functionality between Synbase’s and TWN’s Atlassian code development environments (Bamboo and Bitbucket).

After some testing, the migration was carried out after working hours and according to Sven, the data export and import was the most time consuming. 

When the new environment was ready for active use, an additional user group and permission inspection was done.

 
„In essence, the solution is the same and work continues as before. At this point it can be said that Cloud platform covers all of our requirements and needs,” says Elise.

We are ready to help if you need support with the migration process  

Successful data migration involves preliminary work, thorough preparation, testing as well as expert knowledge and experience.

If you plan to migrate from one Atlassian platform to another, feel free to contact us - we will create an action plan suited to your company’s needs and help to migrate the data safely.