Even the most well thought out plans can hit unforeseen roadblocks and sweeping initiatives like digital transformation could use a push. And even our largest enterprise customers ask us how they can scale more effectively and how our tools are baked into their journeys. We’ve identified a few points that have come up time and time again and thought this would be a great opportunity to share our insights. So, take a moment and ask yourself:
Do any of these match a focus area for you?
- Growing usage on your server instance from 1,000 to 10,000+ users
- Investing significant time monitoring and optimizing the performance of your server instance(s)
- Adding thousands of users to your existing server instance after a merger, acquisition, or the opening of a new office location
- Standardizing on Atlassian tools and undergoing (or looking at implementing) a digital transformation across your organization
If so, you’re most likely wondering what your options are. You’re not alone. Many of our enterprise customers like ANZ, Amadeus, LinkedIn, and AppDynamics are experiencing similar challenges.
Like these customers, your journey with Atlassian likely started with a handful of instances popping up on individual servers. With that number continuing to grow, you quickly realized the Atlassian tools were suddenly critical to the majority of your team’s day-to-day work. You needed to develop a plan — and fast — to get some control over the various instances spread across your organization. You needed to centralize some of the administration and ensure performance as reliance on the tools increased.
As a software or IT leader, estimating and planning for growth is critical. We’ve learned a lot from many of our customers’ journeys and wanted to share some recommendations as you develop a strategy for scale.
How do I know when my organization’s growth requires a new strategy?
Here are some tell-tale signs we’ve observed (and you may be experiencing) of large-scale organic growth:
Business indicators
- Mergers and acquisitions often bring new technologies and teams into the picture. For example, an acquired company’s teams may need to start using one of your HR department’s Service Desk for onboarding.
- As distributed teams grow, it becomes critical that tooling maintains consistent performance and supports the collaboration needed to achieve shared business goals. For example, your new remote development team needs access to your organization’s code repositories.
- Company-wide process transformations are planned. For example, your company is adopting or scaling new practices like Agile, DevOps or ITSM and needs tooling to support the initiative.
Product adoption indicators
- Several teams have their own instance(s) of an Atlassian Server product and you need more control and oversight of these instances.
- A large number of teams are starting to rely on Confluence, Jira, and other Atlassian Server products to get work done each day and planned and unplanned downtime is becoming a problem.
- As adoption of the tools grows, you’re seeing performance degradation. Despite attempts to optimize the instance for the new levels of growth, you never feel like you can get ahead of it.
How to prepare for large-scale organic growth
Are you seeing one or more of these signs in your business? Here are several process and technology tips you can start considering today.
Business processes and teams
1. Consolidate administrative teams to centralize delivery and support of Atlassian products as a service.
2. Improve governance and controls for integrations with internal and external systems.
3. Create best practices specific to your business and infrastructure that help users get the most benefit out of Jira Software, Confluence, and other products with minimal performance and uptime impact.
Technology
4. Increase allocation of CPU, memory, and storage to your Atlassian Server instances.
5. Keep your instance healthy through regular performance testing and monitoring.
6. Set up warm failover so there’s a standby deployment in case of failures.
Create a long-term plan to scale Atlassian products
These recommendations should help address your immediate challenges and give you some time to decide if you need to do more. We often find that our enterprise customers outgrow their single Atlassian Server instance, even after ongoing optimization and especially as they grow beyond 500 users. If you’re already growing past 500 users, here are a few more questions to help you decide whether you need to start thinking about next steps.
- Do I need constant access or high availability to any of my Atlassian tools? If so, do I have a way to achieve that today on my single server instance?
- How do I prevent performance degradation as the next 100 or 1000 users start using the platform?
- How am I going to manage all of these users as the organization continues to grow?
- What’s my plan for an outage?
Do any of those sound familiar? If so, it might be time to check out Atlassian’s enterprise offerings. Atlassian provides you two opportunities to best fit your needs and demands. We have Atlassian Data Center, our self-managed enterprise edition which allows you to deploy on-prem or in a public cloud. Additionally, we have Atlassian Cloud, our SaaS offering of the same products you love and trust. Find out more and decide which offering is right for your company.
If you’re unable to operate in a Cloud environment due to industry regulations, explore how you can scale with Atlassian Data Center.