Migrating to the cloud: Fath’s Atlassian solutions are on the move

System outages are a problem for any business. Products can't be manufactured and services can't be offered, leading to loss of income and irritated customers. Not to mention the costs involved in troubleshooting, postmortem analyses and system restore. FATH is a supplier of products and solutions for the industrial shop floor, automation and digitization. Their Atlassian applications, which are hosted in a data center which FATH manages themselves, were experiencing regular downtimes. But help is now at hand, with a migration to the Atlassian Cloud.

Headquartered in Spalt, in the Middle Franconia region of Bavaria, the FATH Group is a typical German medium-sized enterprise that is doing its bit to keep the local economy running. For over 30 years, they have been manufacturing machine components and fitting parts, and now also offer holistic solutions for lean production as a way of increasing productivity. They employ more than 400 people worldwide, with around 240 in Germany alone.

The Atlassian solutions Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket play a vital role in day-to-day business as part of the company's central Business Intelligence System. Confluence, in particular, is used extensively for managing product development processes by creating pages for to-dos, milestones and production information for each development. It is also used when collaborating with other companies as a way of documenting requirements and to-dos or making product information accessible to external users. FATH employees also use Atlassian solutions to share knowledge within the team and for software development. Consequently, these three applications are vital to any collaboration, including cooperations across production, logistics and sales locations, and are hugely important for product development and, ultimately, the success of the business. Stability, minimal downtimes and constant availability of applications is therefore essential.

High downtimes and costs making change necessary

The reality, however, was that FATH was regularly confronted with system outages in their Azure-hosted solutions with a number of different root causes. The interaction between plugins and Atlassian updates, for example, was unstable, leading to difficulties with startup following updates. This resulted in downtimes, but also an increase in costs required to identify and resolve underlying faults and errors and restore the systems. At the same time, employees frequently had to reboot systems in the middle of the night to ensure that Production had access to Confluence on the early shift. Plus, managing the applications in the data center required a significant amount of effort every day, which was tying up internal resources. For Eckhard Nees, Director of Digitalization, FATH Group, and his team, the moment had come: It was time to move their applications to the Atlassian cloud: "We were and continue to be incredibly happy with the Atlassian applications. But we also had to ensure that our employees had access to them continuously and at all times. Migrating to the cloud was therefore the next logical step for us when it comes to significantly reducing downtimes and, therefore, costs."

In light of the many challenges that would have to be overcome during the migration, the team brought onboard Munich consultancy XALT, an experienced Atlassian Gold Solution Partner, to help with the process. As Eckhard Nees explains, "Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket are among the most important tools we use every day. We needed to migrate them all in one go in order to ensure that our teams didn't have to account for any downtimes." In addition, the team had to make sure that the impact on their colleagues' standard work processes was minimal. That meant connecting the cloud to FATH's Single Sign-On system in order to prevent the need to repeatedly switch between the data center system and the new cloud system.

Small steps to success

In order to make the transition smooth and seamless, the team at XALT began by putting together a migration plan that laid out each individual step. FATH and XALT also held daily catchups throughout the process, in addition to weekly management meetings to discuss the progress of the project. The approach the teams in charge of the migration followed involved migrating the applications to a sandbox instance bit by bit, analyzing the current status of each and running continuous error analysis. These findings were then used to resolve any errors discovered in the source environment, the data center. This was followed by reintegration into the sandbox to evaluate the changes and identify any new errors. 

This process continued until all errors had been identified and resolved, or communicated to the relevant stakeholders. The FATH Group and XALT teams were therefore able to ensure that the final migration of applications, including all data, workflows and marketplace apps, to the Atlassian Cloud went off without a hitch – and without any unexpected hiccups. Finally, the new system was pushed live for FATH colleagues.

Numbers speak the same language

All in all, the entire migration process took around six months, running from mid-2021 to the end of the year. Eckhard Nees at FATH is delighted, "XALT worked with real dedication to drive the migration. Any necessary modifications to Atlassian were also implemented promptly. A successful project all round!" 

While a few functionalities were lost during the switchover, these have since been compensated for elsewhere. Plus, when it comes to the success of the migration, the numbers speak for themselves: FATH was able to increase system availability to 99.9% and reduced the hours of downtime per year to almost zero. The difference here is the benefits offered by SaaS: the automatic system updates that Atlassian regularly releases for its solutions. Operating costs – for staff, maintenance, downtimes etc. – were also reduced by around 20%, savings which can now be put to good use elsewhere.

But the benefits of the cloud go beyond raw numbers and include inbuilt security and data protection options, which can help ensure GDPR compliance, or the central System Dashboard. This means that now all Atlassian applications can be managed simultaneously, something FATH takes advantage of in its identity and access management. Plus, moving forward, a sandbox environment will enable the company to test new configurations and applications before implementing them in order to prevent potential errors. Now, this provider of machine components and innovative solutions for manufacturing is saving on costs, preventing customer frustration and enabling its employees to work more securely and efficiently.