Atlassian Blogs

Demystifying Canada’s Data Residency Policies

Joanne Yo | Canada Regional Lead, Atlassian
Wondering what types of data your agency can store in the cloud and still meet the Canadian government’s data residency requirements? You are not alone. The Canadian Federal Government maintains strict requirements for where government agencies can store their data. Plus, some Canadian provinces have their own regulations that layer on top of the federal ones. The country’s wide range of data residency policies makes it essential to understand which federal and local statutes apply to your data in choosing between Atlassian cloud and Atlassian Data Center hosting.
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Managing Large-scale Instances in Government Agencies

Ken Urban | Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer, Federal, Atlassian
As agencies increase the speed of their IT transformation initiatives, they’re finding even more ways to leverage Atlassian applications. Many government agencies are expanding from one or two successful Atlassian-managed projects, scaling their instances to meet a much broader, agency-wide use case. More and more, I’ve been asked how to manage large instances of Atlassian products across an entire government agency. Having managed multiple, extremely large systems (and having lived to tell about it), I thought it might be useful to list some of the best practices and self-protections my team has developed along the way.
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Scaling Atlassian Deployments for Canadian Government Agencies

Joanne Yo | Canada Regional Lead, Atlassian
Canadian government agencies are using Atlassian solutions to modernize their ICT systems and approaches at record pace. As you discover more ways to leverage the functionality of Atlassian workflows inside of your agency, it’s only natural that your Atlassian user base and needs will grow. As more of your teams standardize on Jira and Confluence, it’s time to evaluate your scaling, support and performance needs. Whether that future involves migrating to Atlassian cloud or the on-premises Atlassian Data Center, you are assured of the high availability, greater reliability, and low latency your agency and programs need. This blog will explore which path is best suited to your agency’s needs.
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2020 Blogs:

How Federal Agencies Can Achieve Section 508 Compliance

Jaclyn Mazzarella | VP of Marketing, Addteq
Technology has enabled users with visual or other impairments to more easily navigate the world around them, and government organizations are increasingly expected to abide by basic digital accessibility standards and to comply with federal requirements.
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How a Large Government Project Streamlined Its Workflow with Atlassian Tools

Jason White | Principal, Apnatomy LL and Certified Agile Leadership Certification
Apnatomy was recently invited to work on a large government project that involves collaboration among national laboratories and universities spread across the country.
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How to Scale Workflow Applications to Fit Federal Projects

Jason White | Principal, Apnatomy LLC, and (CAL1) Certified Agile Leadership, Apnatomy
Software applications that streamline communication, promote collaboration, and create structured reporting practices are powerful tools that agencies can use to optimize project management workflows.
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Remote-Friendly Tools Available for Free

Scott Farquhar | Co-Founder & Co-CEO
Starting today, teams can get cloud-based editions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk, and Jira Core at no charge. This adds to the existing free offerings already in place for Trello, Bitbucket, and Opsgenie, which give all types of teams a set of great capabilities for collaboration. These products can be accessed starting today at www.atlassian.com/free .
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How Your Agency Can Benefit from Enterprise Service Management

Shayla Sander | State & Local Channel Manager, Atlassian
Most of us have interacted with an IT department in our daily life, whether it was as an external customer or an internal employee. When you have an IT issue or need, you follow the typical steps that include sending in a request, an automated response, and so on and so forth. This well-accustomed process is just one part of an established IT strategy called IT Service Management (ITSM). This process can be found in almost every agency – but what if this process was adopted in every department? What are the benefits of scaling this capability? This is how Enterprise Service Management (ESM), an evolution of ITSM, came to be.
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The Winning Tools Your Agency Needs to Modernize their HR and Stakeholder Management Workflows

Justin Leader | CEO of HyperVelocity, an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner
For business and administrative teams in the public sector, especially those in intelligence or military, we find that they are not supported well with their work tracking tools. Often, they are unpleasant or improvised from basic office productivity tools like email and spreadsheets. This is why improving efficiencies and reducing costs can be a challenging but highly rewarding endeavor, with a lot of low-hanging fruit. Two of the most ‘fruitful’ areas we’ve helped clients with in the past years are HR processes (such as onboarding personnel) and stakeholder management. In this post, I want to outline how to effectively modernize your agency’s HR and Stakeholder Management workflows with a few tools.
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Three Ways to Make the Most of your Atlassian Software

Thad West | Co-Founder & CEO, Isos Technology and Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner
More than 150,000 organizations worldwide rely on Atlassian software for project management, collaboration, IT service management, and more. Atlassian’s solutions are highly customizable to fit the needs of a wide variety of organizations, whether it’s the backbone for your application development teams or your knowledge base and workflow engine for your entire organization. Switching to Atlassian products can be a game changer for an organization—and one way to make the most of the investment in the software is to work with an Atlassian Solution Partner.
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Why You Need a Comprehensive Training Program

Shayla Sander | State & Local Channel Manager, Atlassian
Agencies often think of training as something that needs to be prompted by a specific event—such as a new hire or the introduction of a new technology. But organizations that thrive are the ones that see training as a continual process that is integral to their mission and thus build it into their planning and budgeting. Unfortunately, many organizations and employees view training as something to do later when funds or time become available. The reality is that training is often overlooked or forgotten because of competing priorities. Increasingly, however, a comprehensive training program is essential to an agency’s success for a variety of reasons.
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How to Maintain Security in a Fast-Paced DevOps Environment

Mehron Latifi | Federal Sales Representative, Goldfinger Holdings, Inc
The DevOps environment is always changing—and changing quickly. Whether an application is designed for general use or is mission critical to an agency, DevOps must be secure. And it’s not enough for the application to be secure; the entire development environment must be secure as well.
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Secure Cloud Solutions for Every Government Team

Rajmohan Rajagopalan | Co-Founder & Co-CEO Head of Product, Enterprise Cloud Platform
Atlassian software is now available in the widest range of secure cloud solutions than ever before, covering a multi-dimensional spectrum of security and deployment needs.
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Adaptavist's Agile Mentoring Fosters an Agile Mindset in Government Organizations

John Turley | Innovator, Adaptivist
Everyone—from department heads to newspaper headings—is urging you to innovate. You are told that innovation is the key to success. It’s the only way organizations get ahead, become more efficient, and improve stakeholder services. But how you innovate is rarely explained. You probably didn’t take a class on innovation in college. And people in your organization seem invested in keeping everything the same. Not to mention that you have day-to-day work to accomplish. When are you supposed to find time to innovate?
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2019 Blogs:

3 Takeaways from WEST 2019

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
The Atlassian team at Carahsoft attended WEST 2019, the premier naval conference and exposition on the West Coast. Co-sponsored by the AFCEA, the conference brings together military and industry leaders for networking, discussion, and demonstrations of the latest technology.

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Ensuring Scalability for Mission-Critical Atlassian Apps

Jim Dodson | Atlassian Public Sector Strategic Accounts Manager
Ahh, success. Your agency has been growing for several years now: expanding services and getting greater productivity from a sometimes-stretched headcount. Doing more with less, teams are nonetheless excited and ambitious.

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The Dos and Don'ts of Scaling Agile

Jessica Seitz | Atlassian Product Marketing Manager
Atlassian's Work Futurist, Dom Price, on the transformational challenges enterprises are facing - and how to navigate the realities of agile growth.
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Scaling DevOps? Don't Overlook These Fundamental Steps

Ken Urban | Atlassian Senior Solutions Engineer
DevOps is a powerful methodology that drives continuous improvement. But for many agencies, implementing DevOps means a radical shift in how development and operations teams work together.
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The Power of Platform Innovation and Team Collaboration for DoD Modernization

Jim Dodson | Atlassian Public Sector Strategic Accounts Manager
As anyone involved in the defense industry knows, warfare today looks very different than it did just two decades ago. Gone are the days of orderly declarations of war and predictable rules of engagement.
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2018 Blogs:

3 Top Challenges for Government Agency Project Management and How to Solve Them

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
Project management is the art and science of rallying a team, creating a plan and executing on it. That simplified definition hides a whole host of complications – and government agencies have a unique set of challenges to overcome to drive project completion, achieve key success criteria, and do it all while meeting specific compliance requirements.
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3 Steps to Federal DevOps Success

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
Federal agencies today face enormous pressure to transform their outdated applications in order to realize cost savings and efficiencies and improve service delivery. Many agencies still use legacy systems and architecture that lack modern functionality and fail to provide adequate security – in 2018, the Federal budget identified 70.3% of Federal IT spending as related to maintaining legacy systems. As outdated data and code repositories become more difficult to support, these systems become increasingly expensive to maintain.
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3 Takeaways from the 2018 DoDIIS Conference

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
Representatives from the Atlassian team at Carahsoft and Praecipio Consulting attended the recent Defense Intelligence Information System Worldwide Conference (DoDIIS), hosted annually by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
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3 Benefits Agencies Get from Modernizing IT Service Operations

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
The push to modernize IT in government agencies is largely focused on upgrading legacy systems that are built on clunky, obsolete hardware and software platforms. According to the State of Service Desk report, 52% of service desk professionals aren’t satisfied with their current service desk solution.* It makes sense for agencies to replace these systems with the latest technologies – but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. The efficiencies and cost savings realized by upgrading IT systems can disappear quickly if accompanying support and service operations remain disjointed or siloed.
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4 Criteria for Evaluating Agency Knowledge Management Program Effectiveness

Natalie Gregory | Vice President, Open Source Solutions and Atlassian, Carahsoft
A number of external forces are pressuring federal agencies to think long and hard about their knowledge management programs. Shrinking budgets, for one, mean that agencies must find ways to accomplish their missions with fewer resources. At the same time, an aging workforce threatens to leave agencies without the institutional knowledge that’s critical for improving productivity.
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