Jira Migration: A Utility Company’s Journey to Jira

The Overview

Let There be Light

Providing power to more than 1.5 million people, this California-based utility company is at the forefront of developing innovative power solutions and adopting emerging technologies. Its goal is to ensure a carbon-neutral future for the households and businesses it serves. The utility company wants to empower its customers to participate in an innovative, modern electric grid. Its strategy involves aggressively adopting distributed energy resources (DERs) and rethinking its reliance on traditional systems and fuel sources while improving moment-to-moment grid operation and future resource planning.

The Challenge

A Matter of Security

With aggressive innovation comes aggressive development schedules. To streamline the efforts of the 150-person DevOps team responsible for the organization’s websites, payment portals, and electricity transfer management software, the company needed increased agility and more robust reporting capabilities. Initially, the requirement seemed straightforward—extend the capabilities of the in-house Jira Data Center by connecting to Jira Align, the real-time Atlassian tool that links development strategy to execution. The reality, however, was more complex: “The utility company had a very specific use case,” explains Chuck Badger, Account Executive at Cprime. “Jira Align is a cloud-based portfolio tool that connects to Jira, but the only way for it to talk to the servers on-prem was through a connector that broke through their firewall. As a result, it didn’t meet the in-house security compliance requirements.” So before the utility company could implement Jira Align, it needed to pivot to address the compliance issue.

The Solution

Jira Cloud – Creating An Atlassian Ecosystem

The utility company decided to solve the compliance issue by connecting Jira Align and Jira Cloud— and integrating them outside the company network. Achieving this involved migrating the on-prem Jira Data Center to Jira Cloud hosted on AWS and connecting it with Jira Align. “By moving the onprem server to the cloud, Jira Align and Jira Cloud could talk to each other without breaching the firewall,” Badger clarifies.

Having determined that moving the data center to the cloud was the way forward, there was a final hurdle the utility company had to overcome—it had to find a migration specialist. “Atlassian doesn’t do in-house migrations,” explains Catherine Harrell, Delivery Manager for Cprime. “They recommend Atlassian Platinum Partners for that, and Cprime is the most experienced of them.”

Leaving a Long-Standing Relationship

Evaluating its choices, the utility company reached out to Jira-certified Cprime to ensure the seamless migration of Jira on-prem to Jira Cloud. Trust is critical, especially when it comes to enterprise data. The company selected Cprime for its qualifications, but there was an additional motivator: “We are long-standing historical partners.

Cprime has been consulting with the company for years,” says Badger. “We’ve done good work there. They trust us.” A solid relationship can be key to the success of a project.

Establishing the Strategy

With the contracts signed, Cprime’s two-person migration team established a project strategy that kept the client both informed and involved. “During onboarding, we said, ‘Here’s the timeline, here’s our budget, here’s what we’re going to do.’ Once that was done, we moved forward,” says Harrell. To keep the stakeholders in the loop and drive progress, Harrell also followed up with status reports and regular meetings. “I met with the client once a week to stay on top of the schedule.”

” The plan was unusually straightforward. “We always do a test migration,” Harrell explains. “But, in this case, since we were creating a brand new cloud instance, we did the test migration directly to the target instance rather than creating a test instance. We simply migrated the source—the on-prem data center—directly.”

The Results

Improving on an Aggressive Timeline

Migrating directly to a clean cloud environment had obvious benefits, particularly in terms of cutting down on the project duration. “The original timeline was seven weeks for the migration, including a week of user acceptance testing,” recalls Harrell, “but we managed to do the migration in just over four weeks. Normally we quote about three months to complete a migration, but this time our engineer, Francisco Olselame, performed it in just over a month. All in, the project took thirty-two days from start to finish. The client was impressed with the short time frame.”

More significantly, the quality of the cloud data center was first-class from the outset. “Often if a migration is done that quickly, there are errors, but this one was done very well and few issues arose despite a rigorous testing period,” Harrell says.

A Job Well Done

For the utility company, the project was a clear success. The Jira Cloud was ready ahead of schedule. “They were very happy with the move to the cloud. Everything went great and there were no real issues reported,” recounts Badger, summarizing the customer feedback he received.

From the migration team’s perspective, the experience was pure textbook.