Atlassian has launched its most advanced cloud offering to date: Atlassian Cloud Enterprise for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management.
Specifically designed to “meet the needs of [Atlassian’s] enterprise customers,” it’s designed to provide users with improved scalability, security, and governance controls to help standardize various Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management deployments on a purpose-built cloud platform.
Cloud Enterprise offers five new capabilities to address the “core needs” of enterprise customers. These include global scale, where customers are given the ability to not only standardize on one cloud platform that can scale on demand, but also set up multiple instances to support specific team needs; a 99.95% SLA guarantee; and a dedicated support team and enterprise-grade security and compliance to ensure safe, convenient access to Atlassian cloud products on any device while meeting data privacy requirements across the globe.
Customers will also get more powerful governance controls, allowing them to streamline user management more efficiently while gaining faster access to innovative new features such as “smarts” capabilities. The continued partnership between Atlassian and its Marketplace partners should also allow Cloud Enterprise users to meet enterprise needs via a growing list of apps and integrations.
Bala Venkatrao, head of product, Enterprise Cloud at Atlassian, said that while most Atlassian products are often deployed first by individual developers or teams, they usually start to proliferate once IT leaders see the company-wide uses for Atlassian’s platforms.
He said CIOs want control over who’s using what, so the need for better visibility across the enterprise was one a driving force behind the Cloud Enterprise edition.
“Talking to many of the CIOs, they tell me the Cloud Enterprise edition will give them the power and control back to leverage the Atlassian platform a lot more effectively within the enterprise,” Venkatrao said. “With the Cloud Enterprise edition, regardless of whether you have thousands of users or tens of thousands of users, Cloud Enterprise fulfils your requirements.”
The acceleration of cloud computing
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud adoption rates soared, with IDG’s 2020 cloud computing survey found that 32% of IT budgets is expected to be allocated to cloud computing during the next 12 months.
As enterprises were forced to rethink how their business operated, companies found the need to be more agile in the face of innovation and growth, while managing increasingly stringent requirements ranging from security to reliability and change management. That resulted in a large percentage of organizations deploying cloud platforms to ensure continuity.
More than 95% of new Atlassian customers start with its cloud products and a growing number of on-premises users are now beginning to make the switch to cloud. Venkatrao said that a lot of enterprise customers are digitizing their workflows as a result of the pandemic and reassessing how they work and collaborate outside of the office.
“When teams are distributed, work gets distributed and when work gets distributed, you need to be able to collaborate properly. Atlassian’s platforms give you the products and the technology to bring a team together — our mission statement is: how can we unleash the potential of teams? — so all of our products are catering to that demand,” he said.
Charles Betz, principal analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester Research, agreed that remote work is the new normal and said that, as a result, the enterprise service management aspects of Atlassian’s portfolio are important.
“Employees need to be able to locate and access the resources and services they need, and enterprise portals are critical — you can’t walk down to the 4th floor and talk to the HR receptionist anymore,” he said. “This has resulted in the ESM market (Jira Service Desk and its competitors) being a bright spot in the software industry over the past year.”
