Canada Life Enhances Performance and Security with Cloud Migration

Canada Life is one of the largest insurance companies in Canada. For the past 175 years, it has provided security to customers through insurance, wealth management, and healthcare benefit products.

With Atlassian Server EOL on the horizon, Canada Life decided it was time to migrate its Atlassian tools to the cloud. The organization needed support navigating the complexities of a large-scale migration in a highly regulated industry, so they came to Praecipio.

Praecipio guided them through modernizing their IT infrastructure while maintaining data integrity and ensuring the new cloud environment complied with industry standards.

Canada Life faced several challenges in its migration journey to Atlassian Cloud. Given the industry’s strict security requirements, the insurance company debated whether to move to Cloud or Data Center. While the client preferred the benefits of Cloud, Canada Life was concerned about the data hosting requirements since Atlassian had not released Canadian data residency for its cloud products.

Plus, Data Center would enable compliance with Canada’s strict regulations around the use of personal information. Canada Life would eventually find a way to the cloud, but the insurance company still had to ensure the add-ons they used met data residency requirements.

Lastly, the migration's scope was immense. With over three million issues, 1,400 Jira projects, and 1,500 Confluence spaces, the volume of data that needed to be moved added significant complexity to the migration process. 

Canada Life decided to partner with Praecipio for a seamless transition to Atlassian Cloud. With 16+ years of experience leading enterprise-level migrations, we've completed even the most complex projects. Thankfully, Atlassian provided Canada Life early access to Canadian hosting, enabling the insurance company to meet data residency requirements and move forward with the cloud migration.

Praecipio conducted a comprehensive analysis of Canada Life’s Jira and Confluence Server instances. This included evaluating add-ons, identifying external and non-cloud integration points, understanding project data, and analyzing key dependencies. During the assessment, we identified that none of the add-ons stored configuration items in their servers and that all applications complied with Canada Life's data residency requirements. 

Due to the migration's scale, Praecipio pre-migrated all attachments, utilizing the latest improvements in the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA) to expedite the process. Initially, we planned a lift-and-shift migration, but Canada Life’s teams weren’t quite ready. We decided to instead perform a five-phase migration, which we did over five separate weekends, leaving weeks in between each phase to give teams the time they needed to prepare their projects, spaces, and data. 

Additionally, Praecipio helped Canada Life reconfigure ScriptRunner and rewrite scripts to optimize them for the cloud environment. This ensured that our client had the same level of customization and automation as before. In a single weekend, we converted over 1,400 custom scripts to cloud-compatible automation, accelerating the migration process and maintaining continuity in workflows and automation during and after the transition.

Since migrating to Atlassian Cloud, Canada Life has improved performance and security, offloaded maintenance, and experienced efficiency gains, all of which are vital to delivering an exceptional experience to both customers and employees. 

The Canada Life teams were also excited about the modernized user interface and gaining access to the latest updates and features in Jira and Confluence. Moving to Atlassian Cloud has enabled Canada Life to quickly respond to changing business needs, meet security requirements with confidence, and better serve the diverse needs of their customers.