In September 2025, Atlassian® announced that it will retire its Data Center products by March 2029, marking a full transition to a cloud-only business model. The news sent a clear signal to enterprises everywhere: the “cloud-first” era is now a “cloud-only” mandate.

Navigate Atlassian’s data center end-of-life

If you're an Atlassian customer running Data Center, you're likely grappling with what this announcement means for your future tooling strategy. You may be facing a difficult choice between migrating entirely to the Atlassian Cloud or embarking on a complex migration to a new self-managed platform.

At OpenText, we believe enterprises deserve better than mandates — they deserve choice.

What is Atlassian Ascend?

Atlassian Ascend is Atlassian's migration initiative designed to help Data Center customers transition to Atlassian Cloud before the March 2029 end-of-life deadline. The program offers migration tools, technical resources, and dedicated support to assist organizations in moving their Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian products to the cloud.

While Ascend provides valuable guidance for companies ready to embrace a fully cloud-based model, it's fundamentally a one-way journey—once you migrate, returning to a self-managed environment becomes exponentially more complex and costly. For regulated enterprises with non-negotiable compliance requirements, Ascend may feel less like a helpful transition program and more like a countdown to a decision you're not ready to make.

What Atlassian data center customers need to know

Between now and March 28, 2029, Atlassian will continue providing technical support and critical security fixes for Data Center products. After that date, all Data Center subscriptions and Marketplace app licenses will expire, and the software will move into a read-only state.

While Atlassian’s “Ascend” initiative aims to guide customers to its cloud, this transition poses significant challenges for organizations with strict compliance, security, or data residency requirements. For many, moving sensitive development and testing data to a public cloud simply isn’t an option.

Why Atlassian’s cloud-only shift impacts regulated enterprises

After the end-of-life, organizations running unsupported software will face:

• Unpatchable exposure to new vulnerabilities
• Audit and certification risks with no path to remediation
• Operational fragility during hardware refreshes or DR exercises
• Frozen growth, as systems become read-only
• Marketplace instability, with critical plug-ins eventually breaking

For highly regulated, hybrid, or sovereign environments, these risks are business critical. Unsupported infrastructure isn’t a debate; it’s an audit nightmare. This is a moment where your organization must critically assess its long-term needs for security, compliance, data location, and tool integration. A forced migration to a one-size-fits-all cloud platform may not align with your specific business requirements.

In addition, there’s another layer of complexity that’s often overlooked.

Atlassian’s marketplace—once a strength—has now become a source of risk. Many enterprises depend on an array of third-party plug-ins to extend Jira and Confluence functionality. Under Atlassian’s new Ascend model, customers must verify which of those apps will even exist in the new cloud environment, whether they’ll have feature parity, and what migration gaps or costs they may incur. Even vendors offering cloud versions can’t guarantee consistent performance or support timelines. For organizations that rely on critical plug-ins like Xray or Zephyr, the transition could mean unexpected disruption, rework, or loss of capability.

In contrast, OpenText offers a fully integrated, open, and reliable platform — eliminating dependency risk and the operational penalties of maintaining a fragmented ecosystem.

"What about Atlassian's Isolated Cloud option?"

Atlassian has announced an Isolated Cloud offering for 2026, which may initially sound like a middle ground. However, for infrastructure teams in regulated industries, this creates as many questions as it answers:

Timeline and coverage uncertainty

• No firm release date and no guarantee it will support your full toolchain before the 2029 deadline
• Initially limited to Confluence with an unclear roadmap for Jira

Operational control limitations

• You're still dependent on Atlassian's patching windows, incident response, and data handling processes
• "Atlassian-managed" may not satisfy compliance frameworks requiring documented change control or air-gapped environments

Cost and lock-in

• No pricing transparency for total cost of ownership modeling
• Moving into a proprietary isolated cloud is even harder to reverse than Data Center

If your compliance posture requires true operational independence—not just logical isolation—a self-managed platform remains the only proven path forward.

Compliant DevOps velocity with OpenText

For regulated enterprises, compliant velocity means delivering faster without sacrificing audit readiness or security posture. OpenText DevOps Cloud enables exactly that: a safe off-ramp from Jira/Xray sprawl to a unified platform with governed AI, end-to-end traceability, and flexible deployment. It’s how banks, telcos, and public sector organizations continue shipping innovation while keeping sensitive data exactly where it belongs.

Your right to choose: Stability and control with OpenText

We believe that DevOps customers, especially those in regulated industries or with large-scale, complex environments, deserve the flexibility to select the deployment model that best suits their needs, whether that’s Cloud, Self-Managed, or a Hybrid approach.

This is the core tenet of the OpenText DevOps Cloud. Our platform gives customers the freedom to modernize on their own terms, without sacrificing governance or control. It unifies planning, testing, compliance, and release no matter where and how you choose to deploy.

Because OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform and OpenText Core Software Delivery Management share the same code base, we will continue to innovate and support both on-premises and cloud deployments in parallel. This ensures our customers benefit from the same pace of innovation, AI capabilities, and security enhancements—without compromise or fragmentation.

We view this moment not as a disruption, but as an opportunity to strengthen governance, alignment, and quality across the software delivery lifecycle. With a single, integrated platform that bridges deployment models, enterprises can achieve higher consistency, auditability, and resilience—on their own terms.

We are committed to providing you with sustainable, robust, and enterprise-ready alternatives for your essential DevOps toolchain. We are focused on giving you the control, security, and stability you need without forcing you into a public cloud migration that doesn’t fit your business.

One platform, not a patchwork

Where others offer tools, we offer a platform that integrates everything you need — planning, quality management, testing, and release governance — into a single, cohesive system with AI and security built in. Instead of stitched together point solutions, you get:

• Robust self-managed alternatives: Our portfolio is engineered for enterprise scale and complex compliance. Our solutions like OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform and OpenText Software Delivery Management provide the high availability, security, and administrative control that you value in your current self-managed environment—and they are not going anywhere.
• Flexible deployment options: You can deploy our solutions on your own private cloud, on-premises, or leverage our fully managed OpenText Cloud. You choose where your data resides and how your tools are managed.
• Comprehensive toolchain integration: We understand that your ecosystem is more than just one vendor. OpenText solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly with the tools you already use and trust, including popular open-source and commercial products. This makes your transition far less disruptive.
• Long-term stability: OpenText is committed to supporting enterprise customers with both self-managed and cloud offerings for the long term. When you partner with us, you gain a stable vendor dedicated to continuous innovation across all deployment models.

Proof that scales: OpenText trusts OpenText

We didn’t just build this platform: we run on it.

OpenText successfully migrated 7,000 engineers and over five million records from Jira to our own Core Software Delivery Platform. The result: zero missed release cycles, higher visibility, and faster quality feedback across thousands of projects.

Explore Atlassian alternatives before data center end-of-life

If you are an Atlassian Data Center customer looking at a costly and disruptive migration, now is the time to explore your options. You do not have to abandon your commitment to security, control, and performance.

OpenText DevOps Cloud is here to empower you with choice, flexibility, and a migration path that respects your business needs and regulatory constraints. Find out how you can stabilize your toolchain with solutions that are built for the future while honoring your current infrastructure investments.

Ready to discuss a stable, long-term solution that gives you back control?

 Explore OpenText DevOps Cloud – the enterprise alternative to Atlassian Data Center.

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