The Reformed Cloud Skeptic on Losing Control, and How to Get It Back

Cloud Moves at Three Speeds You Have Not Adjusted To

Eduard’s core argument is that cloud is a different animal from the server and data center world you came from, and the difference shows up as speed. Three of them.

The Speed of Change

Atlassian ships constantly because 15,000 people are trying to change the world on your instance. What you do not see is that everyone shares the same cloud, and Atlassian watches every click and every feature that does or does not get used. When the menu flips from horizontal to vertical and you cannot find anything, a decision sits behind it. That visibility is also why Atlassian can innovate faster than it ever could. Old server and data center instances sat firewalled all over the world, never calling home, so nobody knew what was actually used. Cloud tells them. Eduard sees the same dynamic inside his own company, where his developers looked at their usage analytics and decided not to migrate one feature to Forge, because the only people who ever used it were themselves.

The Speed of Adoption

Atlassian is remarkably good at promoting itself, and Eduard means that as a warning. If you administer an org, you get bombarded with emails asking you to enable this, approve that, help a colleague get access. Loom, he suspects, got switched on in plenty of orgs without anyone deciding to. That is viral behavior by design rather than enterprise behavior, and it works. Introduce Jira to an old-style development shop and two weeks later it is everywhere. Default groups, pre-approved domains, and project templates all accelerate the spread. Click the ITSM template and you get something that looks like a fully featured service desk, which works for many teams and disappoints anyone with larger expectations. On one point he was unusually direct. If you are using team-managed projects, stop. He promised that choice will come back to bite you harder than you expect.

Then he showed a photograph of Troy, the archaeological site, layers of history stacked on top of one another. What keeps archaeologists up at night, he noted, is not what they can see but what is missing, and what earlier diggers destroyed getting there. Your Confluence looks like that. Layer upon layer of pages, some current, most not. He tied it back to another session’s promise that product managers can now run dozens of recorded interviews that all flow into Confluence, and asked the question everyone avoids. Who reads all of that? You are creating knowledge faster than your organization can consume or organize it, and pointing AI at that pile expecting clean answers is optimistic.

The Speed of Processes

Move into cloud and everything feels closer and faster. Part of that is real, because the systems are genuinely connected through the teamwork graph, which Eduard still prefers to call a database. Information gets ingested, AI and apps can read across all of it, and results appear that feel like the word Atlassian used to lean on constantly. Magic. He told them to drop it, because you cannot walk into a boardroom of gray-haired executives and sell them magic. The effect is real even if the word had to go. What comes with it is a thirst for best practices, since all of this is new, and people expect someone else to already have the answers.

“we are all blind puppies in here”

Nobody has mastered this, because the ground moves every minute. 

Governance Usually Means a Committee

So how do you fight all of this? Eduard warned that most organizations stop at a single word, governance, which in practice becomes a committee, which he considers close to the worst option available. His preference is compliance, and he does not mean laws and standards. He means compliance to your own policies, plus a way to actually enforce them.

User identity is where he lives, so that is his example. Once your migration finishes, what happens to your users, including the external guests you invited along the way? You can write the policy easily enough. Say every unused guest account added to Confluence gets deactivated within 15 days. The gap Atlassian leaves, and the gap his apps fill, is enforcement of that rule after the fact, so guest accounts stop accumulating forever and your license count stops quietly ballooning.

The same discipline applies elsewhere. Decide whether you sit on annual billing or move to monthly so your spend breathes with real usage. Decide whether you manage access through identity-provider groups, which arrive read-only, or treat those groups as entitlements while managing membership locally. These are questions to answer before you migrate, and then to enforce afterward.

The Real Problem Is Experience

Eduard closed on the point that ties everything together, and it is the one worth pinning to your wall: “This is about lack of experience.”

Loss of control is real, and it is deeply subjective. Something that torments you might not register for the person next to you. His insight is that training will not fix it, because the gap is not knowledge. People spent years in server and data center, and cloud is still new to them. Even the cloud veterans feel it, because cloud changes every single day, which keeps it perpetually new. The only cure for a lack of experience is experience, earned over time.

That has direct consequences for how you lead. If you manage people, stop expecting instant results, or you will burn them out. Give them the room to learn, to gain experience, and to own their outcomes. When you finally work out why something behaved the way it did, document it, because your future self, your team, your manager, and even your AI will thank you for the record. Take comfort where you can. You are not alone, and the people posting on the community forums with total authority do not really know either. Your organization has to prepare, and that preparation costs real effort and real money.

Partners can carry some of the load, though he is particular about what a partner should be. He would rather be a service provider held to real service levels than a sidekick who tags along on your decisions without questioning them. You do not want a Robin who follows you into trouble. You want an Alfred, someone who can do more than you can and who will challenge your call when you are about to make a bad one.