Atlassian has announced the end of Data Center products by March 28, 2029, with new licenses stopping in 2026. In plain terms: every Jira Data Center customer must migrate to Atlassian Cloud—or re-platform entirely. For many regulated industries, government agencies, and large enterprises, this is more than an inconvenience; it’s a direct threat to compliance, budgets, and multi-year IT strategies. Analyst coverage and community discussions are already calling out the disruption and frustration.

Experience Digital.ai Agility's flexible deployment options in action

 

A One-Size-Fits-All Move on an Aggressive Clock

Government agencies, financial institutions, and complex global enterprises built their software delivery on on-premise and hybrid environments for a reason: strict security requirements, deep custom integrations, and predictable costs. Atlassian’s decision to kill Data Center forces these organizations into disruptive, expensive migrations—undoing years of strategic work and IT investment.

And while March 2029 may sound distant, it’s an aggressive and unrealistic deadline for organizations that need years just to budget, plan, and execute a transformation of this scale. Atlassian points to FastShift and Ascend programs as answers, but customers are already finding they fall short. As one user put it: “we have deep integrations and interfaces to our legacy systems—we cannot migrate to Cloud (tested this a lot and it does not work).”

Others cite missing plug-in functionality, forced UI changes, limits on automations and data size, and months of redevelopment and retraining. These aren’t migration aids; they’re costly, disruptive projects with no guarantee of feature parity. As many long-time customers have voiced in Atlassian’s own forums, trust is a two-way street—and they feel abandoned.

Digital.ai Agility: The Alternative That Respects Your Choice

Digital.ai Agility is a scalable, flexible agile planning and portfolio management solution that meets you where you are. You can deploy your way—self-hosted, air-gapped, hosted, hybrid, or FedRAMP Gov Cloud—while preserving years of investment with no costly rebuild. With bi-directional synchronization, you don’t have to turn Jira off on day one. You can run Agility and Jira side-by-side, phasing teams in gradually and keeping work fully integrated until the transformation is complete. This phased, crawl-walk-run migration keeps teams productive and minimizes risk at every step.

More Than a Safe Harbor

Agility isn’t just an escape route. It delivers native OKR capabilities to connect strategy to execution, supports SAFe and adaptive hybrid frameworks, and provides integrated demand management, roadmapping features, and true portfolio-to-team alignment—all built in. Jira users typically need multiple plug-ins for portfolio planning, roadmap creation, and dependency tracking, and even then can’t match Agility’s depth. Add an embedded AI assistant that surfaces dependencies and guides planning decisions, and Agility stands apart. For organizations that require deployment flexibility and a partner that won’t walk away, Digital.ai Agility offers a future defined by your strategy—not ours.

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coreen-wilson

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Coreen Wilson, Senior Product Marketing Manager

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