Case study · Mining & Resources
Moving a 20-year-old Atlassian site to the cloud without the migration tools
Interfuze moved one of Rio Tinto's oldest Atlassian sites, about 20 years old with more than 2,500 users, from Jira and Confluence Server to the cloud. Security constraints ruled out Atlassian's migration tools, so the upgrades and the migration were planned, staged and tested step by step.
Outcomes
- 2,500+ users across about a dozen teams moved from a 20-year-old server site to Jira Cloud
- Every configuration, data set, user and plug-in the teams needed migrated, with integrations kept
- Early migration discounts locked in, significantly reducing cloud licensing costs
The challenge
Atlassian ended support for its server products in February 2024, and Rio Tinto had several Jira server instances to move to the cloud. This project moved one of the largest: a site of about 20 years' standing, probably Rio Tinto's first Atlassian site, used by more than 2,500 people across about a dozen teams, including Geoscientific Data and Reserves Data Management.
The site had integrations that wrote directly to the database, third-party apps and complex configuration. Jira was still on version 6 and Confluence on version 5, so the move needed several version upgrades and a SQL Server upgrade first.
Security constraints meant the on-premises server could not be connected to the internet. That ruled out the standard path of Atlassian's migration tools.
Our approach
We started with discovery: which projects were in scope, how each critical plug-in and customisation would be migrated, and the migration strategy and plan.
We set up a clone of the server so the Jira, Confluence and SQL Server upgrades could run without affecting active users. We cleaned up the database, created the cloud site and its plug-ins, and migrated the in-scope Jira projects and Confluence spaces into a staging cloud environment. The third-party integrations were recreated with stronger cyber security.
In staging, a showcase showed each Jira project owner how to test their projects and spaces in the cloud. User acceptance testing found and fixed migration issues, and users and administrators were trained on Jira and Confluence Cloud.
The live migration ran during a change freeze, followed by hypercare.
The outcome
The Geoscientific Data and Reserves Data Management teams now have a modern, highly available Jira Cloud site that receives Atlassian's ongoing security and feature updates.
All the configuration, data, users and plug-ins they needed from the server instance were migrated to Jira Cloud, and the integrations with other systems were kept.
The new site is much easier to use. The project also started early enough to lock in significant Atlassian discounts for migrating early, which cut Rio Tinto's cloud licensing costs.
“Interfuze helped Rio Tinto to migrate one of our oldest Atlassian On Premise sites to Atlassian Cloud. The Jira and Confluence versions in use hadn't been updated for quite some time. It's fair to say that it wasn't the easiest migration, but we are happy with the results and Interfuze really took ownership and worked through all the problems, always keeping everyone up to date with great communication and teamwork.”
Where to next
Related work
The partner
- Atlassian at Interfuze Licensing, Cloud migrations, upgrades, training and support
Start small
Atlassian end-of-life check A fixed-scope first engagement.