Atlassian Data Center End of Life: Why Security Matters More Than Ever on the Road to Cloud

For large, security-minded enterprises, Atlassian Data Center (DC) has been the preferred deployment model for Confluence and Jira, valued for its customizability and residence within an organization's own fortified perimeter. Since the end-of-life announcement for Atlassian's Server products in early 2024, the path forward has pointed decisively toward the cloud. Now, the runway for DC is also closing. 

Atlassian has announced that its DC products will reach end-of-life (EOL) on March 28, 2029, with sales restrictions beginning much sooner:

• New DC license sales will cease after March 30, 2026 (though new marketplace apps can still be purchased past this date)
• License or app expansions will end after March 30, 2028.

For large enterprises, this is not such a distant deadline. Complex migrations often require 1-3 years of planning, auditing, and execution, making the transition to Cloud an urgent strategic priority. The central question for these organizations is how to translate the security and control intrinsic to Data Center into the Atlassian Cloud ecosystem.

Community Response Highlights Security and Compliance Concerns

The announcement has prompted significant discussion across professional forums, particularly from organizations in highly regulated industries:

• On the Atlassian Community forums, Daniel Shukrun, a consultant to defense and security clients, said: “Clients ask me ‘Does this mean we should look for/implement another product?’… [They] cannot move to the cloud for information security reasons.”
• On Reddit, a user expressed frustration over the operational challenges they’ll face with a move to the cloud: “We use atlassian products in a pretty non-standard way, especially to model non-IT business workflows. Heavy integration with executing code/functions on other on-prem hosted systems not exposed to the internet.”
• Another Solutions Partner on Reddit noted the challenge for large enterprises to make the move: “We've got some customers [that require airgapped solutions], some with ITAR considerations, some with instances so large that Cloud isn't ready for them yet ... It will be interesting, for sure.”

These reactions underscore several recurring themes: the challenges posed by regulatory and compliance blockers, loss of control over custom logging and infrastructure, and concerns about governance when third-party vendors handle sensitive data.

Why Was Data Center Appealing to Large, Regulated Enterprises?

Data Center’s appeal was rooted in its ability to integrate seamlessly with established enterprise security frameworks, offering:

• Network Isolation: Full control over network segmentation, access policies, and traffic monitoring.
• Logging & Forensics: Complete ownership of logs, retention policies, and integrations with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems.
• Data Locality: The ability to store data precisely where internal or external policies required.
• App Governance: Marketplace applications ran within the enterprise environment, subject to its rules.
• Change Management: Upgrade schedules were determined by the organization, not the vendor.

It is unsurprising that a 2023 IDC report found 62% of enterprises still cite security as their primary concern when considering cloud migrations. For risk and compliance teams, Data Center allowed Atlassian’s products to be managed and protected on their own terms. 

After all, Atlassian’s products are built to contain some of the most sensitive, confidential and business-critical data. It is partly this reason why Atlassian decided to delay Bitbucket’s end of life, stating in their announcement, “We understand that your source code is particularly sensitive”. However, project management and document management tools like Confluence and Jira also often contain trade secrets, business strategy, product roadmaps, PII / NPI / PHI, and credentials and secrets that could pose breach risks. Customers’ concerns over privacy and security for these products are also very real.

The Cloud Paradigm: A Shift in the Security Model

Migrating to the cloud fundamentally alters the approach to security enterprises must take. Under the shared responsibility framework, Atlassian secures the infrastructure and platform, while the customer is responsible for identity management, data configuration, and app governance. This shift introduces new considerations:

• Multi-tenancy, while efficient, introduces risks associated with shared infrastructure.
• Identity and access misconfigurations are a leading cause of cloud breaches. As the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in 2024, “The shared responsibility model is often misunderstood… Misconfigurations are the number one driver of breaches.”
• Some Marketplace apps may process or store data outside Atlassian’s direct environment, meaning they must be properly vetted by internal security & compliance teams to ensure they meet minimum security and regulatory requirements.
• Forensic capabilities are different, and in some cases may be more limited compared to having direct host-level access.

To their credit, Atlassian has made strides in addressing these concerns with features like broad data residency options, customer-managed encryption keys (BYOK), FedRAMP certification for its Government Cloud, and an ecosystem of Forge apps that minimize data egress. Furthermore, a 2023 Forrester report noted that mature multi-tenant SaaS environments are not inherently less secure; in fact, large providers often invest in security at a scale few enterprises can match.

So in closing, cloud platforms can be exceptionally secure, and in some cases more resilient and responsive to vulnerabilities than self-managed environments. However, increased care and attention to security and compliance is paramount precisely because the model is different, responsibilities have shifted, and latent risks carry amplified consequences in a cloud environment.

Understanding the New Threat Model: Amplified Risks in the Cloud

Migrating a legacy DC instance without a thorough security audit is akin to moving the contents of a locked basement into a glass house. Vulnerabilities that were once contained behind a private firewall become exposed in a shared, internet-facing environment.

1. Cloud-Native Risks

• Identity as the New Perimeter: With the dissolution of the traditional network boundary, strong identity controls (SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, MFA) become non-negotiable.
• Data and App Posture: Data must be placed in approved geographic regions depending on regulatory requirements, and the security practices of third-party app vendors require rigorous vetting.
• Expanded Attack Surface: Each Marketplace app can introduce a new vector for compliance checks and potential exposure if it processes or stores data externally.
• Loss of Environmental Control: Organizations lose direct control over log pipelines, retention windows, and update schedules, which can conflict with regulated change management processes.

2. The Amplified Impact of Exposed Secrets and PII 

Jira issues and Confluence pages frequently contain embedded API keys, tokens, credentials, and sensitive customer data. According to the Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 74% of all breaches involved a human element, with stolen credentials being a primary vector. This highlights the exact kind of latent risk that accumulates inside collaboration tools over time.

In an on-premise environment, the impact of such an exposure might be contained. In the cloud, the same exposed secret can be exploited more rapidly across a multi-tenant, internet-facing platform. IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that breaches originating from compromised credentials cost an average of $4.76 million and took the longest to identify and contain. The stakes for discovering and remediating these hidden secrets before migration are exceptionally high.

A Security-First Migration Roadmap

A successful migration requires a proactive, security-focused approach:

1. Inventory & Classify: Scan all Jira and Confluence content for secrets, credentials, and sensitive PII before beginning the migration process to minimize the risk of carrying vulnerabilities into the cloud.
2. Remediate & Cleanse: Rotate exposed keys, redact sensitive data, and archive stale, high-risk content.
3. Harden Identity: Enforce universal SAML SSO, MFA, and automated user provisioning via SCIM.
4. Define Compliance Boundaries: Establish clear data residency policies and continuously monitor developments in isolated or government cloud offerings.
5. Vet Marketplace Apps: Prioritize marketplace apps that have strong security best practices, and thoroughly review vendor security disclosures, compliance certifications, and data processing agreements (DPAs).
6. Maintain Post-Migration Visibility: Centralize audit logs, integrate with SIEMs where possible, and implement continuous scanning for new risks in the cloud environment.

The first two steps of this roadmap - inventory and remediation - present a significant technical challenge that should be completed prior to Cloud migration. Manually finding secrets and other risks across millions of decade-old issues, comments, and attachments is a near-impossible task.

Automating Risk Discovery with Soteri

Soteri's security applications, Security for Jira and Security for Confluence, are designed to address the challenge of secrets and PII in large enterprise Atlassian instances directly, automating the otherwise manual and error-prone task of finding hidden risks within accumulated data. The scanners:

• Detect secrets, credentials, and PII across issues, comments, page histories, and attachments.
• Provide centralized dashboards to triage, assess, and remediate discovered risks.
• Operate on both Data Center and Cloud, enabling organizations to clean their instances before migration and continuously monitor them after.
• Is committed to the highest security and regulatory standards by meeting CCPA, GDPR, hand HIPAA standards, as well as SOC 2 Type II certification
• On Data Center, the app performs all scanning natively within the Atlassian environment, ensuring sensitive content is never sent to an external platform. For cloud, our servers never store your data.

Conclusion

The migration from Data Center to Cloud represents a strategic shift from direct environmental control to vendor-managed resilience, scalability, and innovation. Enterprises valued DC for the control it provided; that same confidence can be achieved in the cloud through a deliberate, security-first migration strategy.

With the cost of breaches rising and misconfiguration a leading risk, scanning for and remediating sensitive data before migration is no longer optional. If your organization is looking to move to the cloud with confidence, our Atlassian PII scanners can surface and remediate secrets and PII before you take the next step.