Our Commitment to Atlassian Data Center Customers

The Atlassian ecosystem is currently going through a transformation from self-hosted solutions to cloud solutions hosted by Atlassian. But is cloud actually the solution for everyone? In this article we will look at three key points which indicate that Data Center will be with us for an extended period, and how we at Kantega SSO are addressing them. We will also take a brief look at the cost structure for the two Atlassian platforms when we take the pricing of SSO solutions into account.

Ever since Atlassian announced the EOL for their server plattform, there has been a great push to make customers transition the Atlassian software to the cloud plattform. However, it is clear that for many customers, going directly to cloud is not an option. This is particularly true for enterprise companies who often have an infrastructure that is not ready for cloud. Many organizations also have security or compliance policies that prevent them to go for cloud solutions. Additionally, some organizations want to deploy clusters in their own private cloud so they can be in control of all the data.

In April 2022 Atlassian posted a blog named The Future of Atlassian Data Center. They assured Data Center will still be the go-to solution for businesses that rely on mission-critical needs like: 

• Performance and scale 
• Security and compliance 
• Infrastructure and operation 

Let's look at how the Kantega SSO Enterprise apps on Atlassian Data Center aligns with these needs. 

Performance and scale 

Our goal is that Kantega SSO Enterprise for Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo, shall deliver authentication and user management services for corporations of any size, in a way that is frictionless for the sysadmins and effortless for the user.

Since we have focused on large and mid-sized enterprises when building our apps on the Data Center platform from the very beginning, our SSO services on data center are made with scale and performance in mind. 

• We support industry standard protocols that are designed for large-scale operations.
• Our solutions support growing businesses, for instance through mergers and acquisitions. For instance, we apply thorough automated testing to make sure our solutions scale with little consequence on performance. 
  
• For existing customers, it is easy to migrate our products from server to data center. 
  

Security and compliance 

As a vendor that specialize in user authentication and identity access management (IAM) we fully understand how important security, privacy and compliance is for our customers. To ensure that our products meet our customers expectation, we constantly improve our internal security policies, as any security focused organization should do.

• Our products offer several security capabilities to ensure that users logging in to Atlassian Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo through our solutions are protected.
• We have embraced the concept of Security Champion to ensure that security and dependability is a top priority in everything we do.
• We keep our products up to date with security patches from third parties and notify our customers when we have security-related updates.
  
• Since our product is on-prem only, our customers are in full control of where data is stored and sent.
• We have chosen to not collect data about our customers configurations, user behavior or patterns until we are 100% confident we can do this without introducing any risk to our customers. This also includes system logs.

Infrastructure and operation 

Our team have embraced what we call 'customer-driven development'. In the article The value of great first-line support in a B2B startup, we elaborate why we think this approach has been crucial to ensure product quality and market success.

By listening to our customers and discussing their needs with them, we have gradually expanded our architecture to cope with complex infrastructures and a host of different authentication needs.

• We offer utilities that simplifies user management even for enterprises with thousands of active users.
• Our app is rigged to work seamlessly with private cloud deployments, which is a feasible option when you want to be in control of your data. 
• Powerful testing and trouble-shooting tools with built-in guidance and practice recommendations reduce the risk of failure when deploying a change in the configuration. 
• For new customers, our products are easy to set up and configure, even for enterprises with a complex infrastructure.

Cost of cloud vs. cost of Data Center 

A common conception is that cloud-services are less costly than applications hosted on the data center platform. This is certainly true for smaller businesses, but not necessarily for enterprises that need licenses for hundreds or thousands of users. Especially when we consider the cost of SSO as well.

For example, if we look at the annual cost for organizations that are purchasing new licenses for Jira, and want SSO for their users, the cost for a representative set of user tiers would be as shown in Table 1: 

We can see that for both mid-sized and large enterprise companies, purchasing licenses on data center is actually cheaper. 

From our sales data it is evident that Jira + Confluence is a common combination. Looking at enterprise companies purchasing new licenses for these two products, the cost calculation for the same set of user tiers as used above would be as shown in Table 2

If we look solely at license prices, we see that it is a close tie between cloud and data center for mid-sized companies. For large companies with 2000 or more users, data center is still a cheaper alternative, if they want SSO for their users.   

Note that the price in these examples is for standard cloud licenses. For premium and enterprise cloud customers the savings on data center are even larger. 

Our Promise to our Customers on Data Center  

Since Atlassian announced the EOL for their Server platform late 2020, we have monitored the market closely. Although Atlassian Cloud is growing fast, many of our customers that previously were on server have chosen to migrate to data center, or plan to migrate to data center in the near future.

So, even though we also believe that cloud eventually will be the go-to solution for most companies, we are committed to keep our products up-to-date and our support service at a premium for as long as we have customers that choose to stay on Atlassian Data Center.