Why are companies migrating from Cloud to Server?
Asked by Scott Selberg:

Hi, I've seen a couple of posts of companies wanting to migrate from the Cloud to Server based Confluence. We've been having some discussions about the opposite approach. What is the driver for wanting to be Server based?


Answers:
author: Ross Lindell _Information Officer Pte Ltd_
body: In addition to items above - related to Add-ons, customizations, and public data storage:

1. Atlassian Cloud updates weekly and this 'continuous delivery' can create training problems for large user populations. Sure, 10 or 20 Developers in a garage can tolerate a UI change on Monday after Sunday's Cloud upgrade; but for larger organizations, that might be a really bad Monday. Lack of change control and visibility to updates make the Cloud problematic.  

2. Directory integration with LDAP/Crowd is not supported, but also Cloud users cannot have a FQDN for Cloud Confluence, such as <http://docs.mycompany.com/> which for documentation sites is a branding problem.

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Branding is not one I've heard before, but definitely valid. Thanks!


author: Peter T
body: One thing to add to this excellent list.

On the cloud instance you cannot have google analytic plugged-in. So if you want to find out which pages are getting hit from where and by who, it is not possible.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Another one to add to my list! Thanks!


author: Robert G. Nadon
body: One more (though plugins were mentioned) is that you cannot use Bob's CLI OnDemand, and I use that all the time. I empty trash items that have not been accessed in a month, along with doing other things...


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: There's lots of reasons I run into

* Security and data protection (Not trusting cloud based systems, and it's illegal to hold certain types of data on non-European servers for example)
* Scale - Cloud only goes to 2,000 users, and 100Gb storage.
* Need for the Data Centre functionality
* But the biggest one is probably the flexibility. You can't customise the way Cloud works enough for a lot for a lot of places. No LDAP integration, a very limited list of add-ons, and the fact Connect add-ons can't do a lot of things (e.g. custom fields and workflow functions, themes, and so-on)

comments: author: TomC
body: Nothing significant to add to Nic's reply but an endorsement of the add-ons aspect. While one doesn't want to 'go crazy' with add-ons because that brings its own set of issues, some of our key add-ons - the ones that probably helped make our Confluence instance acceptable to our company's business community (almost every major business department adopted Confluence in organic grassroots fashion, not one was 'told' to use it) - were server-only. A plugin that provided a custom theme that transformed Confluence into a 'business-friendly look and feel' was huge for our internal adoption. One has to look at it in a holistic fashion, taking all of these things into account, to make that 'cloud or server' decision. Good luck!


author: Adrien Ragot 2
body: Add-ons. They have fewer features, for those which exist at all, on Cloud.


Tags: confluence-administration