✓ What’s the difference between Server and Data Center?
✓ The benefits of upgrading to Data Center
✓ Deliver fast, reliable, and scalable products
✓ Stay secure and compliant
✓ Take advantage of infrastructure flexibility
Atlassian understands the need for secure and compliant software. To address that need, they are continually investing in these areas in their Atlassian-managed cloud products. But for those of you who have strict requirements or who are looking for a slower transition to cloud, Data Center is a great option.
But if you’re not ready for Atlassian’s cloud products, keep reading to learn more about the value in our Data Center products and the benefits of upgrading from Server to Data Center.
What’s the difference between Server and Data Center?
Simply put, Data Center is designed for businesses. High performance and availability, scalability, seamless user management and flexible deployment options are just some of the ways Data Center meets the needs of organisations working at scale.
And from February 2021, apps such as Team Calendars for Confluence and Advanced Roadmaps for Jira will be included in Data Center products.
The benefits of upgrading to Data Center
You may be wondering what all of these added Data Center features really mean for your organization. They’re summed it up in three main groups of benefits.
1. Deliver fast, reliable, and scalable products
As an enterprise, you’re probably dealing with large, complex, growing, and/or geographically distributed teams. And if those teams need Atlassian products to get their work done, any performance or availability issues can mean a huge loss in productivity. If you’re unsure whether you need greater speed, reliability, or scalability in your Atlassian products, consider the following questions:
Are your users experiencing delays?
One major culprit of performance issues is concurrent usage. Under high load or at peak times, your product performance is at risk of degrading, which can be frustrating for the teams who are trying to get work done. With the ability to deploy Data Center in a clustered environment, you can better support your company’s scale across multiple nodes, giving your teams a faster, more seamless experience.
Additionally, Atlassian offers features within their Data Center products themselves to help improve performance. In Jira Software and Jira Service Management, you can archive both projects and issues to clear up space, clean up your instance, and make your products more performant.
Speed may also be an issue for employees who are physically distant from your servers. To help you better serve geographically distributed teams, Atlassian offers support for content delivery networks (CDNs) in Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence, as well as smart mirroring & mirror farms in Bitbucket.
Have you suffered from any downtime?
While speed and performance are critical, you may see an even bigger difficulty in productivity if you experience any downtime. Ensuring the reliability and availability of your Atlassian products is crucial. With active clustering, the load balancer will automatically redirect traffic from a failed node to an active node in the cluster, meaning uninterrupted access for your users. Additionally, product-specific features like zero downtime upgrades in Jira Software and Jira Service Management and read-only mode in Confluence ensure consistent access to the products, even when you’re going through planned upgrades.
Are you adding (or expecting to add) new users and teams to your Atlassian products?
Lastly, if you’re growing and adding more users to your Atlassian products, scaling Data Center is quick and easy. You can add nodes to your cluster without any downtime in order to easily scale your products and get them in the hands of the people and teams that need them.
2. Stay secure and compliant
Nowadays, security is important for all businesses, but if you’re in an industry that’s subject to specific regulations, security and compliance are must more important.
One big piece of your security puzzle is making sure that the right people have access to your Atlassian products. Support for SAML and OpenID Connect help meet your authentication standards.
In addition to solid security, demonstrating compliance is critical for businesses in regulated industries. Data Center products make it as easy as possible to comply the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. Advanced auditing in Data Center provides a security-relevant digital record that improves visibility.
3.Take advantage of infrastructure flexibility
In addition to increased control, enterprises have a need for more flexibility in their software. Not every enterprise is the same. With that in mind, Atlassian offers infrastructure flexibility and leaves it up to you to decide how to host your Data Center products.
While you can deploy Data Center on your own hardware, you can also take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and turn to IaaS vendors like AWS or Azure to deploy your Atlassian products. In doing so, you can save time and money and make it even easier to scale Data Center as needed.
