Blog
June 25, 2025
You just received a quote for your Cloud migration involving multiple instances that have been around for years. If you're overwhelmed by the number of add-ons, you might think: “Do we really need all of this?”
Maybe you’re also feeling pressure from your leaders to stick to a pre-determined budget. While it might be easy to pick a few apps from the list and eliminate them for a quick, simple cost reduction, is that the best way to approach a process that affects the future of the business so heavily?
What may look like “a lot of work” is often a critical step toward simplifying, consolidating, and future-proofing your environment. I recommend taking the time to analyze each element of your quote, making sure you truly understand the potential impact of any changes.
Spending a little extra time and money on this up front can save your organization countless hours and headaches over the next few months or years. Plus, Cloud migration is an opportunity for strategic alignment and transformation, and using this time as an opportunity to ensure your team is well-equipped for their new environment can help you get a faster return on your investment.
Here are a few factors to consider as you prepare for your migration and determine which apps you’ll take to your new Cloud environment.
What Can Your Apps Do?
Be honest: when you look at the list of apps in your current Confluence or Jira instance, how much do you know about each one?
There’s no shame in lacking hands-on experience with every app. Atlassian admins aren’t typically the ones creating content in Confluence every day. However, becoming well-versed in Atlassian add-ons can help you make more informed judgments about the value each application provides to your organization. Here’s how you can do that:
Vendor-Provided Demos
Many Atlassian app vendors, including Gliffy, are happy to provide free demos and enablement sessions for customers.
Not only can this help you as an admin understand how each app provides value, but you can also pass that information on to the rest of your team (or invite them to the session), helping them discover new ways to make the most of the tools they have.
You also don’t need to let the conversations with your app vendors end with your migration. Many apps, like Gliffy, have additional features built just for Cloud, and a post-migration enablement session can help your users learn how to make the most of their documentation tools.
Internal Collaboration
Talk to your colleagues about the apps they use and how each one helps them record, share, or consume information. Even if the amount of people using an app seems low, that doesn't necessarily mean it has low value. It's possible that just a few people are using it to create or share highly visible content consumed by many.
Armed with knowledge from app vendors and your teammates, you will be much better prepared to consider the next factor: risk.
What’s the Risk of Leaving Apps Behind?
When you’re determining which apps are truly necessary to take with you in a migration, consider that leaving an app behind inevitably introduces some risk into an already complex process.
It’s much easier to go directly from the Data Center version of an app to the cloud version than it is to drop an app completely and try to implement it again if unforeseen consequences arise.
Ideally, you mitigate as much risk as possible and set your team up for success by taking as many apps with you as you can. However, if you absolutely need to make changes, make sure to consider the implications of your decision.
The average knowledge worker spends close to two and a half hours each day looking for information, leaving less time for crucial tasks that deliver results, but your teammates don’t need to be part of that statistic if they have a centralized source of truth that they can trust and update when necessary.
While there are many factors you need to consider as you migrate, those that impact knowledge management and the effectiveness of your team’s documentation are especially important for productivity and employee satisfaction.
Internal Process Dependencies
Naturally, losing an app you’ve been using for a long time introduces more risk than losing an app you’ve only used for a few months.
If your team has been using a certain app for years, there’s a good chance it has become an integral part of their Confluence content and solidly entrenched in their documentation practices.
For example, some longtime Gliffy customers have thousands of diagrams across various spaces. If they were to lose access to those diagrams, that would impact a lot of pages and significantly hinder the team’s ability to stick to their documentation workflows!
Reliability of Internal Documentation
The biggest risk of leaving an app behind in your migration to Cloud is losing information or losing the ability to keep information up to date.
Let’s use Gliffy as an example again. If you have Gliffy for Data Center and choose not to keep it when you migrate to Cloud, your diagrams will transfer over to the new instance as image attachments. You will still be able to see them, but you won’t be able to make any changes.
For some of your diagrams, this might be okay. But more often than not, diagrams, like most forms of documentation, need to be updated.
Workflows change over time, sometimes daily or weekly, often based on external factors out of your team’s control. Just this year, economic uncertainty has required changes to the way some teams approach purchasing and project timelines.
Databases, networks, and application architecture, all of which can be communicated more efficiently in a visual format, also change as organizations grow and improvements are made. A diagram made today might be worthless in a year unless you can keep it up to date as systems and processes change.
Implementation of Atlassian’s System of Work
Allowing documentation to become outdated due to losing an app isn’t just a problem for the members of your team who use the impacted pages.
Atlassian’s System of Work emphasizes connectedness and cohesion across teams and Atlassian Cloud products, and much of that system is enhanced by Atlassian Intelligence.
If you choose to utilize Atlassian Intelligence when you switch to Cloud, your Confluence documentation (and information contained in other Atlassian tools) is always “on” as a constant input for AI, and it won’t always be able to tell the difference between current and outdated information.
The connection between Confluence documentation and AI will only become more important in the coming months and years as teams continue to implement and become more reliant on AI agents.
When you take advantage of these powerful features Atlassian offers to help you find information faster and collaborate more effectively, you want to make sure you can rely on the information it’s pulling from.
How Can Your App Vendors Provide Migration Assistance?
Migration to Cloud is a big step in your organization’s business transformation journey, and it can come with many challenges, especially if you’re attempting the migration in-house.
Just as you might need assistance from Atlassian support along the way, partnering with vendors who offer quality support can help you eliminate roadblocks faster and achieve excellent results. Here are some things to look for in vendors whose apps you choose to migrate with.
License Support
Many Atlassian app vendors, including Gliffy, offer dual licensing, which means you can pay one price for your old and new instances as you migrate. This helps you avoid additional costs while ensuring everything goes according to plan before you lose access to your old content.
Technical Support
To minimize the risk of throwing a whole migration off schedule, you’ll want to make sure that you partner with app vendors you can count on to resolve potential issues quickly and efficiently.
Not every app vendor has a fully functioning support team. Ask your teammates if they have requested support from an app vendor and if they were satisfied with that experience, or reach out to the vendor yourself with any questions or concerns.
Gliffy's technical support team responds to anything within 24 hours, and you’ll get a response from a real human every time. From answering your questions ahead of a big migration to helping you troubleshoot if something goes wrong, our team is always ready and willing to help.
Will Your Cloud Apps Meet Your Organization’s Security Requirements?
Some organizations have waited to move to Cloud due to strict security and compliance requirements. Internal documentation contains proprietary information and sometimes even legally protected information, so a secure knowledge base is essential.
App vendors are responsible for the data security of their Cloud apps, so you’ll want to ensure that the Cloud version of each of your apps aligns with your organization’s standards.
Atlassian implements strict requirements for all apps listed on the Atlassian Marketplace, but you can look for additional trust markers such as Cloud Fortified designation to find apps that go above and beyond to ensure that your data remains secure.
Some apps, like Gliffy, have also achieved additional security certifications not specific to Atlassian, including SOC 2 Type II compliance.
Final Thoughts
I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice for migrating your apps to Cloud: don’t fall into the trap of dropping them all for the sake of a faster migration just to add them later.
Even with the best intentions, we all know how easy it is to let tomorrow’s problems become the next day’s problems, and so on. Suddenly, it’s been three months post-migration, and your users still don’t have their apps back.
Think about your migration strategy like maintaining a house. Sometimes, investing in something up front can help you prevent a lot of pain and costly damage later.
Lost and outdated information is like your documentation’s equivalent of water damage and mold. I think we can agree that it’s best not to take the risk.