Atlassian Cloud Mythbusting Part 8: Will Cloud Still Work Well When My Company Gets Bigger? - News, tips & guidance for agile, development, Atlassian-Software (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, ...) and Google Cloud

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It's been a long time since the Rolling Stones were telling people "Get Off of My Cloud", and times have certainly changed; nowadays, we move more and more "into the Cloud". But what seems so simple for people privately can cause quite the headache in a professional context. Especially when it comes to sensitive topics such as data protection or information security in general. And so it's not surprising that in many countries, many companies that are considering moving their operations into the Cloud are hesitant at first. Questions about topics like security, performance and scaling weigh heavily on the minds of the decision-makers.

These concerns are understandable, as there have been repeated discussions and negative examples in the past. Reason enough for Seibert Media to take a closer look - and to do some "myth-busting"! Because many things you might think you know about the Cloud are not accurate (anymore). And one thing is clear: the future is looking up!

So join us in a journey into the clouds and read in our eighth article in our "Cloud Mythbusters" series if Atlassian Cloud (which, by the way, is not limited to the Atlassian Cloud!) still works when your company grows much larger. The other articles will deal with the following topics:

What's the Deal with Data Security?
Put on a performance!
Bye-Bye Server Apps – Hello Cloud?
Should I Change Anything in My Change Management?
What Happens to my Data?
What Does My Admin do When There's Less to Admin?
Can I still Customize my Cloud Instance?

In every blog article, we'll get to the bottom of each myth together, and we'll see what's left of them afterwards… And now: enjoy reading and "busting myths"!

Everyone wants to grow, especially children. We often hear the phrase “when I’m grown up” from children throughout their youth. Children are similar to organizations in this way. Every organization has the desire to grow. Where that growth occurs will depend on the organization itself. Some will look at the number of employees, while others will consider revenue or profits as their measures of success.

When choosing a software or service provider, organizations need to consider how well that software or service scales. It would be short-sighted to not consider factors other than the ones that are currently present. The most forward-thinking organizations have predictions of where they will be 5, 10, or even 30 years down the line. After all, we dream of getting bigger, and if a software or service won’t allow us to grow, how can we consider it when we are small?

So when assessing different project management and issue tracking software and deployments, it’s important to understand which of those scales well. This also goes for other software such as internal wikis or service management tools.

The key points to take home from this piece are all positive when it comes to Atlassian. Yes, Atlassian Cloud supports large enterprises. Yes, it is built to grow with your business. And yes, your thousands of users are no problem for Atlassian.

The following myths could very well be holdovers from the time when small teams were the only ones adopting Cloud technologies. Nowadays more enterprise organizations are adopting Cloud, so the myths are definitely just that, myths.

Myth 1: Cloud is only for small teams

Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 have an Atlassian Cloud deployment. This includes over 10 million users. On top of this, Atlassian Cloud has over 170,000 customers across 190 countries.

Among some larger companies using Atlassian Cloud are Redfin, Afterpay, Dropbox, and Rockwell Automation. That should be enough to debunk the myth that Atlassian Cloud tools are only for small teams. However, let’s spend a little bit of time on two of these organizations, Redfin and Rockwell Automation, to see how Atlassian Cloud actually plays out at the enterprise level.

Redfin

Let’s start with a quote from Evan Lerer, the director of engineering at Redfin:

“We [were] managing too much of our own infrastructure. I would much rather be building new things that help us improve rather than maintaining old things… Frankly, having our engineers or IT professionals manage our systems on-premise is a waste of time and money. If there’s a company that already has amazing products, why not have them do it? That way, we can spend our time working on things that we’re good at and reduce maintenance and toil.”

When Redfin originally started out, their teams could use any tool they wanted, because they were so small. As any story goes, they outgrew that possibility and had to land on one tool for the whole organization. They decided Jira and Confluence were the way to go. Originally they had these tools on-premise, but once Cloud became available, the switch was obvious. Redfin were early pioneers of enterprise organizations moving to the Cloud. By moving to Cloud they were able to immediately save over $60,000 on licensing and maintenance costs.

All good things must come to an end though.

Back in those days, Atlassian Cloud only supported up to 1000 users. Redfin had to make a decision and they decided to make the switch to Atlassian Data Center. While this was disappointing they knew that Atlassian Cloud was scaling so it was only a matter of time before they could return to the Cloud and they were right.

Redfin currently has over 1,000 users on Jira and is reaping the benefits of a truly agile approach. All their development teams work in Jira and they have embarked on a massive documentation cleanup in Confluence.

Let’s close with another key quote from Evan Lerer:

“A lot of people, including myself, work here for Redfin’s missions and values. It’s not just about building cool technology. It’s really about helping the customer,” Evan says. “That’s the bigger reason for the technical improvements we’re making. We have large competitors, and we need to be smart about the technologies we use and where we spend our time. We trust Atlassian to help our team deliver world-class products that redefine real estate in the customer’s favor.”

Rockwell Automation

Five thousand users.

Let me say that again: 5,000 users. Rockwell Automation is a true indicator of the potential in Atlassian Cloud. Let’s take a closer look.

A lot of their work, people don’t see. Automation, applications, and systems from Rockwell lead to improvements in efficiency, quality, safety, security, savings, and more. The firm is over 120 years old, so along their journey, they have picked up a few legacy, server-based engineering tools which hindered their productivity and collaboration.

Rockwell chose to embrace the Cloud and adopted Jira and Confluence Cloud, as well as Atlassian Access. Since that day, they have reduced their maintenance overhead by 90%. Take it from Jim Tompkins, a program maefnager at Rockwell:

“We spent over $1 million developing training for our previous tool and didn’t get any value. With Jira, we didn’t spend anything because it’s intuitive and there’s already so much out there.”

Myth 2: Cloud doesn't support the complexity of enterprises

As you can see from the above two case studies, this is simply not true. Redfin has continued to grow throughout the years without problems. Rockwell Automation is an organization steeped in history yet Atlassian Cloud fits their complexity perfectly. In addition to this, Rockwell Automation continues to acquire companies, and with those companies come legacy tools. The new teams are able to switch to Atlassian Cloud upon acquisition and reap the benefits.

Enterprise companies are certainly much different than others. That being said, as seen above, it hasn’t prevented some very large organizations from benefiting from Atlassian Cloud.

Tools for enterprises

In the end, if your organization is looking to reduce maintenance costs and focus on improving business needs, Atlassian Cloud might be the right choice for you. This is of course not without exceptions, as banks or healthcare firms might want to stay behind a firewall. This is why Atlassian continues to offer its Data Center solution. However, Cloud is a one size fits all solution that can get teams up and running quickly. As you can see from the Redfin example, some teams will even switch from Data Center to Cloud, demonstrating the undeniable benefits of Atlassian Cloud.

That's all, folks!

And that's the end of our series of articles on the myths about the cloud and what's really true about them. We hope you had fun reading them and learned some things that you didn't know before. If we could help you to stop thinking about threatening storm clouds whenever you hear or read the word "cloud", then our mission has been accomplished!

We'll be back next week with five good reasons why a move to the cloud would be worthwhile for your company too. Stay tuned and read on after the weekend - we're also happy to receive feedback, no matter whether it's praise, suggestions or criticism!

Do you need more information about the cloud or something completely different?

As Atlassian Platinum Partner, we're always happy to help if you would like to try out the cloud or just need advice. Get in touch with us!