In this blog, we’ll dig into how financial services organizations have leveraged Jira Service Management Features to bolster their internal communication and customer support. 

MARS™ The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of innovative products designed to help customers extend the functionality of their Atlassian products. One of our unique offerings at Contegix is our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS) database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps. Through MARS, Atlassian customers and partners can rely on us for objective, unbiased analysis and metrics on Atlassian Marketplace apps.

There are multiple benefits of moving to the public cloud, but developing a clear strategy and successfully making the migration are critical to realizing those benefits. So how do we do that?

Aerospace and defense organizations need to be on the cutting edge of technological innovation—and they need modern IT processes and tools to support modern work.

The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of innovative products designed to help customers extend the functionality of their Atlassian products

Atlassian has announced updated pricing for all Cloud customers which will come into effect on October 18th, 2023.

Made up of all Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances, the 500 Club is a key part of our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS)–Contegix'sdatabase of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.

At Contegix, one of our unique offerings as an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner is our MARS database of 3rd party applications. Through MARS we are able to gain unparalleled insights into Atlassian Marketplace applications, provide unbiased recommendations to our customers, and help promote the Marketplace across the Atlassian ecosystem. As a part of this, at Contegix we are always on the lookout for new and exciting Atlassian Marketplace applications. This month we will be highlighting Vault Password Manager by Alpha Serve!

MARS™ Are you looking for quality Atlassian Marketplace apps to help enhance the productivity of your Atlassian implementation? Contegix's Marketplace Analytics Research Service (MARS) is perfectly suited to help provide you with objective, unbiased analysis of all Atlassian Marketplace products.

A fundamental pillar of agile development is continuous improvement. So as the leading provider of agile collaboration and service delivery tools, Atlassian is continuously improving its tools, too. Here, we’ll explore forecasted Atlassian updates slated to be released over the summer and into the fall. From enhanced migration capabilities to improved approval management features, these updates are designed to provide teams with more control over their Atlassian environment.

Two decades after the agile manifesto, agile is here to stay. With the dispersal of teams, agile supports the increased business speed that is now vital for organizations to remain competitive. However, implementing agile isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Even though agile adoption continues to rise, as many as half of agile adopters describe their agile usage as incomplete and inconsistent.

MARS™ The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of innovative products designed to help customers extend the functionality of their Atlassian products. One of our unique offerings at Contegix is our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS) database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps. Through MARS, Atlassian customers and partners can rely on us for objective, unbiased analysis and metrics on Atlassian Marketplace apps.

Welcome to the new Apps in the 500 Club! Made up of all Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances, the 500 Club is a key part of our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS)–Contegix'sdatabase of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.

Through MARS, we want to make sure that we're showing some attention and appreciation to apps under this 500-instance threshold. That's why every month we highlight the fastest-growing apps with less than 500 instances as our "Apps to Watch".

Product discovery teams are vital in a company’s ability to deliver value to customers: they conduct research and gather insights to understand user needs, identify market opportunities, and define product requirements. When done successfully, every product in development meets the proven needs and expectations of the target audience. However, product discovery teams often utilize several tools to aggregate vital information, from user research to data analytics—and these disparate platforms can create lapses in communication, confusion, and wasted time and energy for team members.

Made up of all Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances, the 500 Club is a key part of our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS)–Contegix'sdatabase of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.

For several months, AI—specifically generative text applications—have been top of mind in the tech sector. And now, Atlassian Intelligence is bringing that functionality to Atlassian’s product suite, enabling users to automate support in Jira Service Management, and accelerate efficient IT Service Management (ITSM) across their organization. But what is ITSM and why should organizations practice it at all?

At Contegix, we believe that insight into which apps are growing is a very insightful view into the Marketplace. Because of this, every month we unveil the 10 fastest-growing apps over the past month by both absolute and percentage growth and split between paid and free apps.

Through MARS we invest a lot of time and energy into analyzing apps with over 500 instances that are in our "500 Club". We assign our own categories to these apps and then subsequently include them in all category analyses that we perform. However, through MARS we want to make sure that we're showing some attention and appreciation to apps under this 500-instance threshold. That's why every month we highlight the fastest-growing apps with less than 500 instances as our "Apps to Watch".

The last three years have radically transformed work. Between increased pressure to operate faster, the proliferation of AI technologies, and the adjustment to dispersed workforces, the novel business challenges organizations face today look different than they did in early 2020, when Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 5.0 was released. To help organizations address new hurdles, SAFe 6.0 debuted earlier this year.

Obstacles can arise for any organization pursuing digital transformation, but for public sector teams, complex security and compliance requirements are a unique hurdle. It’s no surprise that DevSecOps, short for development, security, and operations, has become a priority for many of these teams.

MARS™ The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of innovative products designed to help customers extend the functionality of their Atlassian products. One of our unique offerings at Contegix is our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS) database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps. Through MARS, Atlassian customers and partners can rely on us for objective, unbiased analysis and metrics on Atlassian Marketplace apps.

Over the past year, IT leaders have faced numerous economic, technical and remote workforce challenges, all of which have forced many to assess the business value of expanding cloud operations. According to a recent Gartner report, the proportion of IT spending that is being allocated to cloud will accelerate even further in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis.

Out of our 24 MARS™ categories shown in the blog, the 10 largest categories make up 90% of all instances. These 10 categories represent the main areas in which Jira and Confluence users look to the Atlassian Marketplace to extend the functionality of their products. Our report here will focus on those 10 categories.

With 130,000 tech employees laid off already this year, the industry is in a state of flux—and so are IT departments. As company priorities and team structures shift during an uncertain economy, IT teams often receive a sudden influx of tasks related to onboarding and offboarding, access management, and other service desk requests.

At Contegix, we believe that insight into which apps are growing is a very insightful view into the Marketplace. Because of this, every month we unveil the 10 fastest-growing apps over the past month by both absolute and percentage growth and split between paid and free apps.

Welcome to the new Apps in the 500 Club! Made up of all Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances, the 500 Club is a key part of our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS)–Contegix'sdatabase of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.

Out of our 24 MARS™ categories, the 10 largest categories make up 90% of all Atlassian Marketplace instances. These 10 categories represent the main areas in which Jira and Confluence users look to the Marketplace to extend the functionality of their products. This blog will focus on those 10 categories.

MARS™ The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of innovative products designed to help customers extend the functionality of their Atlassian products. One of our unique offerings at Contegix is our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS) database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps. Through MARS, Atlassian customers and partners can rely on us for objective, unbiased analysis and metrics on Atlassian Marketplace apps.

A merger or acquisition is a major business transformation, requiring organization leaders to integrate new departments and unify two different companies’ technology and systems. Several aspects of this work, including issuing employees updated email addresses, laptops, and access permissions, as well as building new workflows for recently joined teams, fall under the scope of the organization’s IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy.

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management is an indispensable tool used by over 45,000 organizations to manage service requests and build agile teams in IT and beyond. While JSM is rooted in IT service management, it can help every team provide quality, efficient responses to service requests. From document approval in the legal department to employee onboarding in HR, JSM improves communication and response efficiency, keeping business goals and service operations aligned.

Atlassian’s Confluence is the only documentation tool designed to integrate seamlessly with Jira, providing an additional level of support to bolster Jira’s effectiveness. If your team is using Jira, you might be wondering how Confluence can level up your Jira implementation.

What comes to mind when you think about agile workflows and service management platforms? For many, these tools are associated with software and IT teams, which need flexible platforms to document, assign, and track tasks. But the reality is that every part of the enterprise can benefit from digital tools that streamline workflows and organize business-critical operations, especially now that so many teams are digital-first and remote.

Contegix and Appfire invite you to join them at Pink23's Annual ITSM Conference, Feb 26th-Mar 1st 2023 in Las Vegas. Explore best practices, methodologies, our SYNTHESIS Solutions Platform and network with industry leaders.

On January 10th, 2023, Atlassian announced changes to their Server and Data Center products pricing as of February 15th, 2023. These changes affect Jira Software and Confluence with impacts varying based on whether customers are on advantaged or list pricing. On Server, both advantaged and list prices will be changing while on Data Center only advantaged pricing will be subject to change. You can find more details on the changes below.

According to the 2022 Cloud Security Report, cloud security incidents are still on the rise, causing misconfigurations and exposed user data. More than a quarter of organizations (27 percent) have experienced a public cloud security incident—up 10 percent from 2021.

With the end of Atlassian server fast approaching, at Contegix we think that it is high time for server customers to make a New Year’s Resolution for 2023: make the move to the Cloud!

Organizations have made dramatic changes to their tech stacks: Last year, the average company reportedly used 110 SaaS apps compared to just 16 in 2019, a near sevenfold increase. To address novel remote-work needs and increasing application sprawl, many organizations are now rethinking their software tools and processes.

Think back to this time last year. How much has your organization changed? You may have gained new team members, while some employees transitioned into new roles or moved on to other companies. Perhaps today, your team collaborates differently with other departments based on current projects, or maybe your company has adopted more technology to support employees at work.

Digital.ai have released their 16th annual State of Agile report, with a number of very interesting takeaways; the simplest being the growing popularity and dominance of Atlassian. Atlassian’s success is further compounded by the growth of SAFe and the important role tools play in Agile going forward.

Public sector IT projects are falling short: According to recent McKinsey research, only one in 200 projects delivers the intended benefits on time and within budget. And compared to private sector organizations, where delays are less common, public sector cost overruns are nearly three times as high.

Of the 200,000 organizations that use Atlassian products, no two teams are the same. That’s why as users, being able to adjust Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and other applications based on company needs—and as Atlassian releases new product features—is critical. For several months, however, Atlassian server users have been in a limbo state, unable to upgrade or downgrade their apps. This paralysis adds a level of urgency to transition to cloud before support for server products ends in February 2024.

As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we are passionate about finding unique ways in which we can maximize the value of the Atlassian portfolio of products.

For the majority of companies, innovation is happening in the cloud, whether that means launching a new product or making critical updates to existing features. However, out of the 75% of global tech leaders that confirm this strategy, only 8% say they have experience working with cloud-related tools.

If you see software engineers wearing their “leave me alone” headphones, it’s often for a good reason: They only have about 10 hours a week to perform “deep work,” according to Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time report.

2022 is shaping up to be the best year yet for Jira Service Management (JSM).

At Contegix, we are a leading Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner operating across North America. With a number of unique offerings that help bring value to our customers in ever more innovative ways, we help our customers maximize the value they’re getting from their Atlassian stack. With Atlassian primarily acting as a product-first organization, as a Solution Partner, we operate as Atlassian’s ‘boots on the ground’, assisting customers with Atlassian Solutions, Training, Hosting, and Licensing.

Efficiency is a common goal for government agencies—especially as the White House Office of the National Cyber Director has recently announced it will be analyzing performance data as part of an effort to measure federal agencies' performance.

By Solomon Gifford and James Hunt Over the summer of 2022, Contegix switched its ITSM platform from ServiceNow to Jira Service Management (JSM). As an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Provider, we had confidence and experience in Atlassian’s ITSM solution, knowing it would not only suit our team’s needs but would also provide a platform to demonstrate our knowledge and experience.

Like most industries, the public sector is moving through digital transformation to improve the services it provides to constituents. But many agencies are falling behind on their digital initiatives. According to a report by Deloitte, government agencies were still significantly relying upon their legacy operating models even while leveraging certain tech capabilities prior to the pandemic.

According to recent research from Forrester, 60% of executives identified that their companies are on a five-year journey to adopt agile approaches. Despite this enthusiasm for agile practices, more companies are continuing to use waterfall tactics (43% this year compared to 29% in 2019).

Cloud technology plays an essential role in bringing innovation and better outcomes to today's healthcare systems, from helping doctors care for patients remotely to enabling collaboration between providers in other institutions. And as new technology is introduced, healthcare digitization will only increase.

In a recent Atlassian survey, 57 percent of respondents said their team isn’t operating as efficiently as it should—and 12 percent say this disorganization is letting their stakeholders down. Structured support can make the difference between success and failure, and as workforces remain hybrid or even fully remote, many companies are struggling to create a sound connective tissue with existing tech and workflows.

As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we are passionate about finding unique ways in which we can maximize the value of the Atlassian portfolio of products. From the unparalleled experience and expertise of our consulting staff to our white-glove dedicated license management team we are perfectly situated to assist customers through every stage of their Atlassian journey.

No matter what cloud product an organization needs, there’s likely an app—or two—to help optimize performance. The Atlassian Marketplace offers hundreds of apps and integrations designed to uplevel user experience while helping teams work better together. Since Atlassian Server products will lose support in 2024, it’s even more important to choose streamlined cloud-based apps.

The costs associated with a security breach are higher than ever, up to an average of $4.24 million per business. Moving from DevOps to a DevSecOps framework has become one of the best ways for organizations to guarantee that code ships securely—and to avoid the costly repercussions of breaches.

While much is known about developers' preferred coding languages, frameworks and cloud platforms, less is understood about how developers prefer to work and what they actually want to work on. Wonder no more. Atlassian has released its first-ever “State of the Developer” report, which provides a fresh look at how developers' attitudes and preferences about work have changed in a remote and hybrid world.

Businesses have been forced to contend with an unfortunate growing fact: a security breach is all but inevitable. Last year, nearly every type of cyberattack—from ransomware to encrypted threats—increased by anywhere from 6% to over 100%. Encrypted threats rank the highest, having shot up by 167% (10.4 million attacks).

With their first acquisition since bringing Comalatech onboard in April, Appfire have acquired Arsenale, the makers of Arsenale Dataplane – Jira Reports. Appfire were already the market leaders in Reporting (with 17,000+ instances across their 15 MARS categorized Reporting apps), and this move has further strengthened this position in this space. The move also builds upon Appfire’s growing expertise with Arsenale founder David Goldstein joining the team.

Since 2009, Atlassian has hosted an annual summit to show the world what’s new within the Atlassian ecosystem and how, with the help of the right tools, software teams around the globe can unleash their full potential. After a two-year break from hosting an in-person event, Atlassian’s live experience resumed this past April—and it did so with a bang. The Team ’22 event brought together leaders, innovators and thinkers in one place to connect and harness new skills for the workplace, where Atlassian unveiled two new products specifically designed for the modern way of work.

Yesterday, the Space Force and industry partners quietly made history. Well, as quietly as possible when launching giant metal towers full of rocket fuel into space at speeds up to 10k MPH. August 4th, 2022, saw the space coast making and breaking records:

Solomon Gifford, the Senior Director of Product Development at Contegix provides a first-hand account of his first ITSM migration: the challenges and lessons learned:

The pandemic was a catalyst for many changes, but none as dramatic as the shift to cloud services. Virtually overnight, companies were forced to set up teams to work remotely, which required a strong cloud-based infrastructure.

If you’re like most people, you grasp information best when you see it in a visual form. Research has found that the brain processes images and videos up to 60,000 times faster than simple text. As a result, image-based communication can be a valuable tool for sharing important information with your employees and colleagues, especially in a fast-paced digital environment.

As Contegix has evolved over the past 20 years from a software development side project to a leading Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner, one guiding principle has been especially important to co-founder Matthew Porter: “We lift the burden today so tomorrow is better.”

Just as Contegix started as a software company before growing into the Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner it is today, Atlassian itself began more than 20 years ago as a company creating tools to support other companies’ customer support teams to help businesses operate more efficiently. Atlassian, now an industry leader for software developer tools, at one point needed a hosting provider. And Contegix, albeit a growing organization itself, was there to answer the call.

For any company, the path from budding startup to industry leader can include surprising changes in strategic direction. This is especially true in tech, where products and services are continuously evolving as new innovations hit the market.

Like the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” it takes an ecosystem to grow a company in today’s marketplace. According to recent research from McKinsey & Company, to thrive in the current business environment organizations should operate as a radically flattened structure with an ecosystem approach to growth.

Cloud adoption has been accelerating for years—and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. The IDC predicts that more than $1.3 trillion will be spent on cloud worldwide by 2025. However, as your business—and the number of tools you use—grows, it’s easy to acquire too much of a good thing.

Cloud misconfigurations, including gaps, errors and glitches, are on the rise. According to the U.S. National Security Agency, misconfiguration is the most prevalent cloud vulnerability. And the security implications can be significant, with cybercriminals exploiting access to data.

As the world continues to shift towards online experiences, the sustainable digitalization of business-critical operations and user experiences have become the driving forces behind an organization’s enterprise strategy.

Now that organizations have felt the benefits of remote work—it’s crucial their workflows are designed to support new flexible and dispersed work standards. To enable these distributed workflows, droves of organizations are turning to cloud. While cloud solutions can provide a slew of benefits to almost any organization—including better team collaboration, IT cost efficiency, scalability and more—there isn’t a one-size-fits-all plan for cloud migration or implementation.

Despite the rapid growth of cloud adoption, increasing by 25% in the last year alone, cloud environments are still notoriously complex for most organizations to manage.

Companies are packing up their digital workloads and moving from on-premise hardware servers to the cloud—so much so that 90% of global enterprises will use multi-cloud systems this year. According to McKinsey research, the onset of the pandemic was one factor driving cloud adoption, as many organizations fast tracked migration plans to meet increasing demand for virtual services.

Atlassian has made no secret about its plan to go all in on cloud—announcing last year it stopped selling new server licenses, and will soon retire its on-prem server products.

From issuing official documents to administering unemployment benefits or regulating entire industries, the size and scope of public sector services is complex, often requiring input from hundreds of stakeholders to execute. And when these projects don’t succeed, the effects can be high profile and far ranging—just think of the initial healthcare.gov website rollout.

The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work has introduced new opportunities for developers to boost their productivity: 60% report they release code two times faster than last year, thanks to more flexible work options and fewer distractions than the office. However, organizations must make sure developers' workloads are sustainable for the long term by selecting the right tools and infrastructure to support the shift in work culture.

On the eve of Team ’22, Appfire have announced their biggest acquisition this year so far. Appfire are welcoming Canadian app vendor Comalatech to their family of apps in an acquisition that will strengthen Appfire’s Confluence positioning significantly. Comalatech are the makers of Comala Document Management, Comala Metadata, and Comala Publishing as well as a host of other documentation-related apps for Confluence.

Achieving a robust cybersecurity posture has been mission-critical as businesses experienced a staggering spike in cybercrime last year.

Complex services such as purchasing a vehicle have long gone digital to keep up with consumers’ demand for convenience and efficiency. But simply operating as an online business isn’t enough to compete in today’s digital market––in order to thrive, organizations must evolve their digital services as both consumer and business priorities evolve. For example, automotive companies today are gearing up to provide in-car software that could teach drivers how to operate their vehicle off-road or even provide entertainment suggestions.

As the need to deliver online service support grows, IT service management (ITSM) teams, the long unsung heroes behind organizations’ support efforts, are being thrust into the spotlight. These teams are responsible for meeting the growing demand for high-quality support experiences, such as providing first-class ticketing and online service management systems. However, existing processes or tools are not designed to meet the pace of today’s “always-on” world and can often hinder ITSM teams from rapid responses to internal or client issues.

Agile development rose to prominence over a decade ago as developers needed faster, more efficient processes to deliver high-quality software releases. But despite the rise of agile, silos between development and operations teams still created bottlenecks slowing down the development process. DevOps, which brings together development and IT teams, emerged as the next evolution in development to boost collaboration and release better software, faster.

The DoD Office of the Chief Information Officer provides policy and guidance regarding the development and utilization of software and hardware. These resources, paired with industry best-practices, play a significant role in shaping the DoD’s adoption of DevSecOps and Zero Trust Architecture.

In January 2022 Atlassian announced the acquisition of Percept.AI, an automated AI support tool. Percept.AI uses AI to power their virtual agent technology, helping organizations automate tier-1 support interactions while allowing for seamless transitions to human experts without context being lost. This acquisition is big news for Atlassian and in particular Jira Service Management (JSM).

From the dev team scrum to the boardroom and even within the oval office, software security has emerged as a top priority. Yet, inside these organizations, teams are still struggling to determine who is actually responsible for it.

Over the past year and a half, the heroic efforts of IT teams have played a pivotal role in keeping businesses and services alive by building digital experiences to support a remote-first world. But even as IT departments shift gears from “emergency mode” to looking ahead to the future, the pace of digitalization is unlikely to slow down anytime soon. Going forward, IT professionals will still be essential to enable business-critical operations and optimize digital experiences to meet the needs of users.

Secure software development, while important for any organization, is especially critical within the public sector, where highly sensitive information is processed. For government IT teams, complying with complex regulations such as FedRAMP (a standard specifically developed to protect government data) is a required aspect of software development.

Back in January 2020, we released an article on "Is the ITSM Market Quickly Becoming a Two-Horse Race?" Now with the latest release of Apps Run the World's report, we can see that this prediction has come true. In Apps Run The World's previous report ServiceNow and Atlassian combined for a market share of around 50%. Since then they have expanded this dominance and together now account for 58% of the ITSM market.

From fintech to ecommerce, organizations across industries have increasingly relied on the cloud to build and offer digital services.

Despite a rocky road to its final passage, President Biden recently signed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a much-needed measure to address the nation’s critical need to improve cybersecurity. The new law allocates a whopping $2 billion to fund cybersecurity and related provisions designed to bolster security resiliency—in both public and private sectors—and better safeguard communities against the fallout of cyberattacks.

Adopting DevSecOps can help IT teams improve software security, a top priority for many organizations. DevSecOps, the latest evolution of DevOps, shifts security left in the software development lifecycle and reimagines security as a shared responsibility between development, operations and security professionals. But before teams adopt DevSecOps, establishing a clearly defined vision and understanding how existing operations need to change is paramount.

Following their acquisition of Project Configurator for Jira in November 2021, Appfire has made another individual app purchase by bringing Numbered Headings into their significant app portfolio. Numbered Headings is a very interesting app that allows Confluence users to easily number headings on their Confluence pages with numerous formatting options that make documented content simple and easy to organize.

With their acquisition of ALM Works and its Structure suite of apps, Tempo has ended a year of major takeovers in the Atlassian ecosystem with one of the most significant of them all. ALM Works are the makers of Structure – Project Management at Scale. Structure is one of the big two Planning applications on the Atlassian Marketplace (along with BigPicture). Structure is an incredibly popular product with 10,989 active installs while ALM Works’ more stripped back Structure.Gantt product has 4,779.

Developers have adjusted to collaborating with each other and issuing software releases remotely––and this change in workstyle has impacted organizations’ performance. A recent report from Gartner shows that although 92% of development teams are writing more code, 63% of teams are releasing less frequently, and the average release size is up by 64%.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, has been around for nearly a decade. But with the dramatic rise of high-profile, cloud-based cyberattacks at a time when citizens’ reliance on technology has grown, cybersecurity has become top priority—even capturing the attention of the nation’s highest office as more organizations begin working with the public sector.

What keeps government agencies reliant on legacy systems? Stringent regulations surrounding compliance and security requirements, limited funding and changing priorities within the public sector are all key factors. Recently, the Biden administration recognized the disparity between technological innovation in the public and private sectors and emphasized the importance of improving technology to make the government more consumer-friendly.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning Winston Churchill For those who are still on server – there’s naturally some trepidation about making the move to cloud. This post will cover just how comprehensive cloud has become and why you need to get there fast.

Atlassian's new platform, Forge, provides developers with a hosted platform to build secure and reliable custom apps that integrate with Atlassian’s products.

The need to deliver high-quality online service support to customers or internal users has never been more important.

DevOps—the process of joining software development and IT operations teams to work collaboratively—enables organizations to quickly and easily deploy software and make continuous improvements. While private companies have long mastered this framework to meet the changing demands of consumers, DevOps in the public sector is gaining traction as well, with organizations like the United States Air Force, National Science Foundation and NASA leading the way.

From a major gas pipeline to a top meat producer and even dozens of government agencies— all types of organizations fell victim to cyberattacks over the past year.

Nearly all of our everyday interactions operate online: commerce, healthcare, connecting with others. To increase efficiency in online operations, more and more industries are collecting and storing data on cloud based software, and the public sector is no different. While almost half of government organizations use cloud services, Gartner predicts significant growth to continue — with an estimated 17% increase in spending this year.

Over the past year, businesses from every industry have been forced to make tough financial decisions about IT spending. For most organizations, a significant portion (or perhaps even all) of their 2020 budgets were spent equipping teams with the right devices, tools, platforms and security to perform their jobs from home. While these expenses were necessary to navigate the reality of remote work, many organizations will pull back on spending to level out their budget this year.

As the workforce evolves in response to an increased reliance on technology, fast-paced innovation and global interconnectedness, teams across industries are transforming their business models and technological infrastructure to operate more efficiently. Establishing business agility—the adoption of agile practices across all teams, not just software development—is key for businesses to stay competitive and scale in the current climate.

Today, collaboration platforms are seen as an essential component of how we work, and according to a survey of 1,200 global IT decision-makers, could replace traditional communications methods by 2024. As a result of more hybrid work models and co-located teams, organizations need tools that keep them connected. And long-standing collaboration platforms like Atlassian’s Confluence, are evolving to answer the call.

When it comes to implementing agile methodologies, software or product development teams most commonly choose one of two frameworks: Scrum or Kanban. Scrum is far and away the most-used approach for implementing agile according to the 2020 State of Agile Report: about three-quarters of respondents surveyed said they use Scrum or a hybrid of Scrum and another method (like Kanban).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, employees were worried most about their ability to collaborate effectively— in one study, 75% cited their inability to collaborate as a top concern associated with working from home.

Developers have always been particularly at-risk for burnout: The nature of their jobs is very isolating, and they spend much of their days in deep concentration, staring intently at a computer screen.

Agile software development has become the preferred development technique among tech leaders today. Unlike traditional methods like waterfall software development, which focuses on creating tight and exact stages, agile takes a more modern, iterative approach—allowing teams to continually revisit, examine and adjust their development techniques to deliver applications that meet business requirements effectively and quickly.

Earlier this year, Atlassian stopped selling new licenses for its on-prem server products, also ceasing upgrades and downgrades, new feature development and support for these licenses. For organizations with existing Atlassian on-prem server licenses, the announcement means an eventual migration from Atlassian’s on-prem servers to Atlassian’s public cloud by February 2024 (data centers will still receive support and new features for those not ready for cloud).

Many CIOs and IT leaders spent a significant portion of their 2020 budgets outfitting staff across departments with remote-friendly devices, tools and platforms due to the pandemic. Now that 2021 is well underway, it’s clear some companies will inevitably face the need to cut IT spending or reconsider investing in normally table stakes line items ranging from software license renewals to architecture upgrades. Luckily, Atlassian’s suite of tools are built to help IT leaders mitigate and manage IT-related costs.

Many top global companies have adopted the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology for setting strategic goals and tracking their outcomes. The methodology was originally created by Intel CEO Andy Grove who taught the methodology to John Doerr, former Intel executive, legendary venture capitalist and New York Times best-selling author of “Measure What Matters,” the definitive guide to adopting and implementing OKRs.

Over the past year, remote work has become the norm, even the preferred workstyle, for most industries. After enjoying its benefits, like cost savings and increased productivity, some businesses are planning to continue running some (or all) of their operations remotely permanently.

Over the past year, IT leaders have faced numerous economic, technical and remote workforce challenges, all of which have forced many to assess the business value of expanding cloud operations. According to a recent Gartner report, the proportion of IT spending that is being allocated to cloud will accelerate even further in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis.

Atlassian collaboration tools can be customized to your team, improving efficiency and value in your business

Government agencies can improve collaboration and ease their digital transformation with Atlassian tools

See each of Atlassian's major products and what they do

Jira Service Desk has grown into a tool for the whole enterprise, see how it has changed.

As more companies move toward a distributed workforce, establishing streamlined workflows with integrated tools can drastically improve productivity. Although the Atlassian Suite is designed to streamline management and performance of tasks, teams don’t always get the most out of the tools—possibly due to lack of bandwidth or platform expertise.

Go beyond HIPAA in protecting healthcare data with these 3 action items

Government teleworking is on the rise—the Social Security Agency recently converted 4,000 call center employees to at-home agents, for instance. This movement to remote work has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but public sector agencies at the federal, state and local levels are poised to benefit from thoughtful IT activity as a result.

The healthcare community is under immense stress right now as the COVID-19 pandemic consumes public health expertise, medical research capacity, hospital resources and equipment availability. Luckily, there are IT and tech solutions developed with compliance in mind that hospitals and government agencies can implement to help them through the crisis.

Working from home is a new, and likely persisting, reality for many people logging on from around the world. Within this dispersed work environment, enterprise security has never been more important—or, arguably, more challenging—to get right.

To combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states have mandated that all “non-essential” businesses close their offices. As a result, in an unprecedented transformation of the workforce, thousands of employees are fully remote for the first time.

One of our primary focuses at Contegix is watching the Atlassian Marketplace carefully; picking up trends, analyzing top sellers and performers, and producing reports on the different categories of apps. Due to COVID-19 and the large-scale shift around the world to remote work, the criticality of an intranet becomes elevated; without visual cues that someone isn’t busy, staff are more hesitant to grab a moment with a colleague for any number of reasons – like perhaps that the information they want is already online.

As we enter 2020, Contegix is migrating all customers running on our OpenStack platform to one of our new VMware clouds. We’ve invested a significant amount of resources and capital into building this new infrastructure and we are confident that the new clouds will provide a more stable environment for high-performing applications. We’ve outlined the benefits and technical details of these new clouds below: Enterprise vs. Open-Source

Explore 5 ways to make your digital transformation easier with tools from Atlassian and services from Contegix!

Selecting the right workflow management, team communication, and incident response tools requires time, team buy-in, training, and a hefty investment. Atlassian’s Jira suite offers multiple paths to productivity that can be tailored depending on specific challenges or opportunities facing companies.

There are several cases that can be made for using Atlassian’s suite of products to help you drive collaboration across your department. With Jira, project support professionals can manage and track issues, while tools like Confluence and Trello help promote cross-team collaboration, enabling your employees to create and organize tasks in one place. Bitbucket, meanwhile, allows IT departments to work together to create code and test it before deployment.

If you’re an online retailer, you’ll likely never receive more traffic to your site in one day than you will on Cyber Monday. This is good news for your sales numbers. . . but only if users can complete transactions in a timely manner. If your e-commerce system isn’t capable, or your network can’t process the traffic spikes, your website can’t perform. This can lead to the loss of sales and maybe even customers all together. After all, a whopping 40% of customers will leave your site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.

With the onset of data analytics software and technology that tracks customer behavior, organizations today have more information about their customers than ever before.

JIRA applications offer a number of different configuration options, depending on the version you’re running, plugins, network, and hardware set-up. This makes it an incredibly versatile and adaptable tool – but it can also make diagnosing issues more than a little complicated.

Downtime can be devastating for your business. It can cost your business thousands and thousands of dollars in potential customers.

Project Management often has tentacles into the whole organization and knows best how to implement change within an organization.

Who uses project management? Every industry!

Jira 8 is the latest major release of Jira – but what exactly does it do?

How do you start a Jira without tracking the work in Jira? Chicken before the egg, right? At Contegix Professional Services, we have solved the problem of governing Jira with Jira.

So, you've decided to install an Atlassian server application, but what database should you use?

Business and Software teams looking to create/share documents and ideas throughout their entire organization need a tool that is seamless, intuitive, and reliable. At Contegix, we turn to Confluence.

For those that are just about to begin using the Atlassian tools, and even those that are already, there is one consistent question, "Do we use the Atlassian Cloud or Server version?

In this article, we will examine a work process that is common to every team in every business and compare a typical process with how it could be accomplished using Jira.

Consider this article, along with Atlassian’s official documentation, as a step-by-step guide for performing your migration.

Most industries are more competitive year-over-year and the efficiency brought to projects leveraging Jira allows teams a competitive advantage.

Traditional IT teams have a huge selection when it comes to choosing a Service Desk, however these are not the only teams that can benefit from a service desk.

Security stress can become paralyzing, and inhibit your ability to make decisions because you’re no longer in balance or control.

To help you get a better sense of the danger phishing poses, let’s take a detailed look at the history of these scams, what they entail, and how you can protect yourself against them.

FedRAMP compliance is notoriously difficult to achieve. Layering on the complexity of supporting a development team who needs specific application support for their Atlassian dev tools can make this challenge seem impossible.

In this post, I’ll explain why FedRAMP has changed the way the public and private sectors look at security.

Plugins are a great feature that can make these powerful tools, even more useful and flexible. Unfortunately, they can also be one of the most common sources of problems.

Webcams are now a staple for our laptops, tablets, and even our phones. As with every aspect of our technologically-inclined society, webcams are not as unassuming as they seem.

Post-it notes tacked on a whiteboard are convenient for planning, but they won’t survive the length of a sprint. That’s why a project management tool like Atlassian’s Jira is needed.

We will be covering five worthy DevOps tools for every developer, ranging from multi-million dollar enterprises to the most modest of startups.

what are the most common mistakes people make when moving to the public cloud? Let’s discuss so you can avoid them.

Confluence provides powerful tools for teams to collaborate, complete projects, and review tasks. Here are the top five project management features of Confluence that are useful to any team.

There are multiple benefits of moving to the public cloud, but developing a clear strategy and successfully making the migration are critical to realizing those benefits. So how do we do that?

For a business, scalability means that you are prepared to handle an increasing number of customers, clients, and/or users.

SSDs are growing more in popularity everyday. Their speed is now not the only thing they have in their favor.

Atlassian has a marketplace filled with Confluence add-ons for extending and adding specific features. Here are 5 options for increasing the flexibility of Confluence within the business.

Authentication is a security process that began long before the age of computing. Only in our current parlance, does it seem linked to our personal digital security.

In this post, we’ll take a look at a PM’s perspective of the FedRAMP trenches. We’ll discuss what to expect throughout the process, as well as ways to increase your chances of achieving project success.

Keeping track of who’s testing what, when, and why is essential for maintaining test management best practices and getting applications to market faster.

“IaaS,” “PaaS,” and “SaaS” are three terms anyone in the cloud computing industry should familiarize themselves with.

Three things to consider when looking to achieve compliance in the cloud.

Before we start on why Waterfall is even better in Jira, let us discuss the role of traditional planning. Rightly traditional planning is one of the most important disciplines in getting anything done successfully, not just in Waterfall.

In the past, the size of a data center determined the amount of data it could handle. However, today density is the key factor that determines the capacity of the facility.

After your company has decided that a managed Domain Name System (DNS) solution is the right move there are some important next steps you should take.