As part of an effort to accelerate migrations to the cloud, Atlassian is making instances of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core running in the cloud available for free, as well as premium options that provide access to the same software with access to additional features and support.

Harsh Jawharkar, head of go-to-market for Cloud Platform at Atlassian, said it’s apparent most organizations want to shift from on-premises to cloud versions of Atlassian platforms. However, they need control and more transparency into how much that shift will cost, said Jawharkar.

At the same time, Atlassian views the cloud as an opportunity to expose more end users to its offerings by making them available for free. These editions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core will be available in the coming months alongside existing free editions of Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie.

In addition, Atlassian is now extending its Cloud Premium service to now include Jira Software and Confluence, with a premium edition of the Jira Service Desk coming soon. Atlassian is also making 50% to 75% discounts available to eligible academic organizations and non-profit organizations.

Atlassian is also moving to provide organizations with more control over where data gets stored. Customers now can choose where data in the Atlassian cloud will be stored to address regulatory compliance concerns. Atlassian also recently added a data encryption at rest and in-transit capability to ensure no data stored in its cloud is compromised by unauthorized access.

In addition, Atlassian is updating Atlassian Access, a console for managing access to its various platforms, to include support for Google Cloud Identity and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Atlassian also committed to providing support for multiple cloud access brokers (CASBs) starting with an early access program involving McAfee and Bitglass before the end of this year.

Atlassian is also promising enhancements to its audit log and early access to tools, which will help organizations better understand how Atlassian software is being consumed and their associated billing costs. The whole process of onboarding and offboarding users is becoming critical as organizations become more concerned about controlling their cloud application costs, noted Jawharkar.

Finally, Atlassian is enabling customers to customize the URLs associated with Atlassian cloud service to reflect their own brands.

Atlassian today has more than 150,000 customers consuming its software, including Costco, Delta Airlines, Office Depot and Visa. The most widely employed Atlassian application in DevOps environments is Jira, a project management application optimized for tracking software development projects. Atlassian is now trying to extend that base of customers to increase usage of OpsGenie, a set of tools for managing alerts.

Obviously, each IT organization is going to transition to the cloud at its own pace. The issue most of them are wrestling with now is determining whether it makes more economic sense to move to the cloud or stick with the on-premises IT environment they already have in place.

— Mike Vizard