5 signs it's time to move beyond Jira Server
Atlassian tools are often the backbone of large and rapidly growing organisations. They allow you to work and collaborate across multiple departments and geographies, and provide essential time-saving features that help your business thrive in fast-moving environments.
For many organisations, Atlassian tools are not just useful, they are essential to business success. Yet, many enterprise size businesses are still relying on a single server for all of their Atlassian needs—and are experiencing daily issues and pains in return.
While Jira Server is great for small and mid-sized organisations, there's a ceiling to its capacity and efficiency. With thousands of users all relying on Jira for their role there will be projects and tickets flying around, alongside everyday indexing, reporting, and administration. This becomes a huge drain on the performance of your instance meaning that single node is having to work overtime to keep things running. Time is spent fighting fires when it could be spent making the most of what Jira offers. For larger businesses, using a Server instance of Jira can end up holding you back and even inhibit scaling altogether.
Sound familiar? Here are five other signs that your business has outgrown Jira Server.
1 . Jira has become mission-critical
Many organisations begin their Atlassian journey by implementing Jira on an individual or team level. As the organisation grows and collaboration becomes more important, so does the adoption of the Atlassian toolset across teams and departments. Before you know it, Jira has become central to the way your business gets things done.
With this comes a demand for tool consistency, stability, and around-the-clock support for daily users, alongside increased security needs to keep your information and users safe.
Problems with any of these requirements can be especially detrimental to larger businesses. And in the end, Jira can end up causing more problems than it solves.
2. You’re scaling fast and adding new Jira users daily
Many organisations scale faster than Jira Server will allow.
More Jira users means an increase in requirements for your applications. Do they provide everything your teams need and are they working as expected?
If your teams are becoming increasingly disgruntled when using Jira, chances are it isn't quite meeting their needs.
Scaling on Server, however, is a time-consuming and tricky task. There are so many different considerations for large and complex businesses, for example, adding capacity on demand, deciding when to perform application upgrades and patches, and avoiding single points of failure. You need to really understand what is important for your organisation and ensure this is prioritised—all without overloading the system.
Another consideration is whether your new and existing Jira users actually know how to use the system properly, which is often not the case when Atlassian technology provision has grown in an ad-hoc way. Without the correct training and up-skilling, your users will not be making the most of the great features that Jira provides.
3. You’ve experienced low performance and outages for your Jira instance
With thousands of users working on Jira at the same time, drops in performance are almost inevitable as everything is trying to work from a single server and overwhelming it.
If you've noticed drops in performance when trying to perform tasks on Jira, it’s probably time to upgrade from Server. Regular performance issues are often the first sign that your server is overloaded, and can result in more persistent outages.
Because one of the main limitations of Server is that everything is working from a single source, if something fails, then your whole server goes down and none of your users will be able to access necessary applications. This downtime will be extremely costly for your organisation, and probably stressful for your employees too—especially your IT teams!
4. You are overrun with service tickets
When your organisation is growing and in-house teams are dealing with every support ticket, the backlog can build and build until it becomes unmanageable. This can cause huge stress on your support teams and stop issues being resolved quickly and thoroughly.
In the best case scenario, these problems take longer to solve, and your users are left waiting to complete their essential tasks. It’s also more likely that quick fixes will be applied, which can see problems reoccur as the root of the issue hasn't been resolved.
In the worst case scenario, you could see your whole support team getting fed up and quitting!
5. You're spending too long on maintenance and admin
Alongside drowning in support tickets, teams working with an ailing Jira platform can spend all day maintaining it and undertaking time-consuming admin. This time could be better spent improving processes for your business and working on more long-term projects.
Users are unable to make the most of Jira because new developments and features are pushed aside while regular maintenance has to be prioritised. And even when you can implement new developments, you are forced to schedule downtime because everything is happening from your single server.
Businesses are left dealing with day-to-day server management and missing out on long-term, big picture thinking. This—alongside performance issues, downtime, and constant demand for support—comes at a real price for your organisation.
Scale to infinity with Adaptavist Enterprise Cloud
Adaptavist Enterprise Cloud has been designed for large and complex organisations with global teams that rely on Atlassian tools.
Enterprise Cloud provides the availability and uptime your users demand, delivered as a flexible cloud experience. This gives you greater resilience, better performance, and many more deployment options, all while providing additional support for your mission-critical cloud apps.
Our partnership with top platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), means we can split nodes across availability zones, delivering maximum resilience at all times.
Scaling issues are eliminated as additional nodes are added to your cluster to cater for increased user numbers. Plus, nodes can also be dedicated to single tasks such as indexing and reporting, so your performance and reliability stays high at all times.
Your dedicated Adaptavist account manager is on-hand to predict when new nodes might need to be added, or where nodes dedicated to particular functions might make your user experience better.
All maintenance and admin time is passed to us, freeing up your internal teams to work on more useful tasks. And with unparalleled support, direct from engineers, you can trust that your issues will be resolved quickly and thoroughly.
For a seamless cloud experience at scale, talk to us today about Adaptavist Enterprise Cloud.
