adesso consolidates instances and pursues a hybrid migration to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise

Growth in employees, customers, and IT infrastructure

adesso has been using Atlassian tools to organize and structure work for over 15 years. They first introduced Jira in 2008, when the service provider had around 500 employees. Later, they added Confluence as a company-wide knowledge management system, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket, Opsgenie, and Trello.

However, three factors in particular led to a less-than-optimal IT structure developing over time: adesso's continuous, major growth; the establishment of new business units and subsidiaries; and the migration of acquired companies. Through this organic growth and acquisitions, adesso’s Atlassian cloud ecosystem grew to more than 50 instances.

Having so many instances also led to challenges at the administrative level, such as increasing complexities with billing and server maintenance. In fact, the IT Operations Team had to focus almost exclusively on this administrative task.

adesso decided to tackle these challenges at the beginning of 2021. Their plan was to consolidate the cloud instances into one Atlassian Cloud Enterprise instance and migrate all other Atlassian infrastructure to the cloud, which would require good communication and coordination with the cloud site administrators.

However, adesso quickly realized a hybrid approach would be a better fit for them. "At the beginning, we had the — admittedly somewhat naive — idea that we would simply migrate everything. However, we discarded this plan early on for technical, legal, and financial reasons," explains Stefano Gioia, Lead Portfolio & Architecture Management, who led the migration project. "Instead, we decided to pursue a hybrid strategy and to largely start from scratch in the cloud."

A controlled new start in the cloud

The switch to a hybrid structure took place in October 2022, three months after adesso introduced Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, and was part of a learning process.

First, Stefano’s team discussed the requirements for this new structure. On one hand, it was important for adesso to keep their technology up to date and make it available to customers. On the other hand, customers have different requirements, and some don’t want to or can’t work in the cloud due to guidelines or regulations. For these reasons, a hybrid approach made the most sense for the company.

When setting up Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, Stefano and his team made a conscious decision to start with a clean slate. "We have grown so much in recent years, both internally and with regard to our customers, that we had over 10,000 users in the on-prem instances. It is practically impossible to find out which project, which workflow, and which fields are actually still needed,” Stefano says. “So we made a clean sweep. In addition, we now work according to the credo 'If you need access, you ask and you get it. If you don't need access, you don't ask.' Another advantage of instance-based and user-based billing with regard to the apps used is that it’s fully utilized and proves to be very scalable.”

Furthermore, adesso offers specialist departments and subsidiaries of the Group the full range of enterprise cloud functionalities so they can respond to their customers' respective project needs.

In the future, the adesso team will continue to work on access management and user lifecycle management. They first need to confirm how many users must work in the cloud and on premise. Then, further decisions can be made, such as whether one instance is sufficient and which apps are still missing for whom. The implementation of Atlassian Guard helps here because it provides a precise overview of the users and usage of Atlassian Cloud products.

This is also an example of the efficient, effective collaboration between adesso and Atlassian during the project. Although the two teams were no longer having regular calls at that point in the migration process, Atlassian ensured that the right contacts were available at short notice for questions, explanations, and support when adesso introduced Atlassian Guard and during other times of need. This flexible, agile collaboration suited the working methods of both companies. 

Even though the project has not yet been fully completed, initial improvements, such as a significant reduction in administrative work, are already evident in practice. In addition, the new Atlassian Cloud Enterprise infrastructure offers the great advantage that it can grow organically with the company — this time in a scalable, effectively controlled manner.