From server rooms to strategic advantage: Enterprises win with Atlassian Cloud

Atlassian Cloud gives enterprises agility, resilience and scalability.

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South African enterprises are under more pressure than ever before: product cycles are accelerating, customer expectations are rising and teams are increasingly distributed across geographies. Yet many CIOs and CTOs are still relying on on-premises solutions designed for a previous era.

Christiaan Scheepers, Atlassian Partnership Lead at Ovations Technologies, has seen this shift first-hand. He says: "Legacy systems offer familiarity, but familiarity can be the biggest barrier to innovation.”

Scheepers says organisations that will lead in the next decade won’t just be cloud-enabled, they will be cloud-native. However, he notes: “The acceleration of cloud isn’t about technology alone; it’s about positioning organisations to thrive in a digital-first economy.”

Scheepers says Atlassian Cloud has become the backbone of the transformation organisations need to thrive in future.

Atlassian Cloud is a suite of cloud-based software and collaboration tools, including a range of products designed to help teams and organisations with software development, project management and team collaboration tasks.

“Atlassian Cloud gives enterprises the agility, resilience and global scalability they need to compete,” he says. “Atlassian Cloud isn’t a tool upgrade. It’s a mindset shift. It's time to re-imagine what's possible when your tools are no longer in the basement – but at the edge of innovation.”

Atlassian Cloud also boosts security and mitigates risk, he notes.

“Security was once the reason executives were hesitant to move to the cloud. Today it’s the reason they adopt it. Atlassian Cloud Premium and Enterprise editions deliver compliance with SOC2, ISO 27001 and GDPR out of the box, along with enterprise-grade uptime SLAs and built-in disaster recovery,” Scheepers says.

“Gone are the days when cloud was perceived as less secure. With Atlassian, the security frameworks are already baked in, which reduces the burden on internal teams.”

Scheepers is clear about what happens once enterprises migrate: “The most immediate change we see is in operational efficiency and product velocity. Cloud customers benefit from zero-downtime upgrades, elastic scalability and access to the latest features without waiting for release cycles.”

For IT leaders, this means less firefighting. For product teams, faster delivery. For the business, greater speed-to-market and resilience.

With Atlassian Analytics, leaders can connect data across Jira, JSM and Confluence to identify bottlenecks, predict SLA risks and optimise capacity planning before problems escalate.

“Atlassian Analytics turns siloed activity into strategic intelligence,” Scheepers explains. “It empowers teams to move from reactive firefighting to proactive optimisation and that shift has profound impacts at the executive level.”

Add Atlassian Intelligence (AI) on top, and teams gain a trusted co-pilot: summarising notes in Confluence, triaging Jira tickets and recommending workflows.

For executives still hesitant about making the move, Scheepers is direct: “Cloud migration isn’t just an IT project; it’s a modernisation strategy. Organisations that delay risk falling behind not just in technology, but in agility and talent retention.”

Ovations’ proven migration framework addresses this risk head-on, with readiness assessments, governance playbooks and structured change management to ensure smooth adoption.

Independent analysis confirms what Ovations has seen in practice. According to a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, organisations realised:

• 230% ROI
• $2.4 million NPV
• Payback in <six months

Download the executive briefing: The Total Economic Impact of Atlassian Cloud Enterprise

Independent Forrester Consulting research, distilled into a practical framework for CTOs and CIOs.

“In the boardroom, cloud should be positioned as a growth initiative,” says Scheepers. “It’s about unlocking new operating models, faster go-to-market and future-proofing collaboration across borders. Cloud-first thinking is a signal to the market, to partners and to talent that your organisation is building for the future.”