An eye-opening conversation with Atlassian’s CISO, Adrian Ludwig.

It’s been nearly two decades since the agile manifesto was published, and it seems “agile” is on everyone’s mind. Marketing teams are experimenting with sprints, operations teams are adopting scrum, and HR teams are looking to bring more flexibility into their strategy.

As every company becomes a software company, your role as an IT professional is evolving from supporting the business to differentiating the business. You’re now enabling change and technical innovation to drive competitive advantage. To keep up in this world, it’s time for IT teams to move toward agile approaches that value ease of use, collaboration, and delivering value.

Go behind the scenes with the Jira team and see how we performance-engineered our way to a zero-affinity cloud architecture that runs at enterprise scale. Performance engineering is a big deal when you’re serving millions of users from every corner of the globe. We previously wrote about a large engineering transformation program for Jira & Confluence, which we codenamed Vertigo – read more about the overall program here.

IT teams, we are at a crossroads. We’ve spent years, if not decades, being thought of as cost centers at the best of times, and more often, a source of bottlenecks. Now, we’re making a name for ourselves as facilitators of innovation and providers of legendary service. Our companies are recognizing how critical we are to their success.

Implementing security best practices for your cloud products might feel like you’re playing a game of chess against a chess grandmaster. You think you need to know the most complex strategies and plan ten moves in advance, but in reality, you’re playing against a 3rd-grade checkers player.

On the security team, we don’t manage any Atlassian products like other Atlassian teams do. Our main product is trust, and that’s a job that’s never finished. To me, security is more of a mindset; one of constant diligence, continuous improvement, and seeking out ways to innovate.

Where does your company want to be in one year? Five years? Ten years? And what does this growth mean for your technology stack? These questions play on repeat for any growing organization.

A record high of 162,414 cars per day cross the Golden Gate bridge, in wind, rain, and countless other environmental factors (don’t say earthquakes!) that compound stress on it. An Atlassian instance is a lot like a bridge. Users access each instance hundreds and thousands of times a day, amid conditions that include the size of the instance itself (with its load of comments, pages, repos, etc.), the apps you’ve added, API calls, and much more.

We’re constantly amazed by what our customers are able to do with Jira Software. Whether it’s planning a Mars landing, building a cochlear implant, or modernizing the way thousands of people work at a single company — the ways in which people use the Jira platform are multiplying by the day.