TradingHub: Building an Enforceable, Company‑Wide Platform with Atlassian Cloud

TradingHub’s existing internal tooling centered on a self‑hosted GitLab instance, which had become a bottleneck for firm‑wide growth and operational compliance. While GitLab provided strong capabilities for source control and technical teams, it lacked enforced, end‑to‑end workflows suitable for a heavily regulated environment.

Core challenges included:

• Difficulty in process enforcement: Minimalist project management made it hard to mandate fields, acceptance criteria, and specific workflows required for auditable trails.
• High maintenance overhead: Hosting, upgrades, and custom scripts consumed DevOps time that could be spent on product innovation.
• Limited firm‑wide adoption: Non‑engineering teams (Legal, HR, Finance) found the system inaccessible, leading to fragmented documentation and tracking.
• Rising costs: Total cost of ownership (TCO) of licensing and cloud hosting outpaced a consolidated Atlassian stack.

TradingHub selected Eficode to manage the complexity of migrating to Atlassian Cloud — not just for technical expertise, but for the trust established from the very first conversations.

From the procurement stage, Eficode’s technical team engaged directly with TradingHub’s internal specialists, demonstrating a clear understanding of the challenges ahead.

“The first thing was that we felt that the Eficode people were speaking our language.”

— Brian Foley, Infrastructure and Internal Services Director, TradingHub

This open, discovery-led dialogue set the tone for the project. Eficode’s pre-sales engineers provided detailed, transparent explanations of how the migration could be executed, validating confidence in both the plan and the partnership.

That early alignment built a strong foundation of trust, turning what could have been a transactional migration into a collaborative, problem-solving relationship that carried through every delivery phase.

Migration method: Data Parsing and Distribution, including:

• Data distribution: Splitting all historical issue data from a single GitLab project into the correct project “pods” in Jira based on defined mapping criteria (e.g., labels).
• Formatting translation: Converting wiki and documentation from Markdown to rich Confluence format, while mapping issue data and attachments to correct Jira fields.

Division of responsibilities: TradingHub handled the repository migration from GitLab to Bitbucket, while Eficode focused on translating and re-architecting the issue and wiki data.

The production go‑live was a demonstrable success. Post-migration, users encountered no significant issues requiring immediate support; any findings were extremely minor. This outcome was enabled by a collaborative, highly iterative delivery model and diligent stakeholder‑led UAT.

Implementation was executed through approximately 40 iterative migration versions, rapidly demonstrated to stakeholders for feedback. A key technical shift was moving from convention‑based process management in GitLab to Jira’s structured, enforcement‑driven model. To meet the demanding cut-over window (migrating ~50,000 issues over a single weekend), Eficode combined live scripting with bulk changes, thereby overcoming the performance limits of CSV imports.

Stakeholder‑led UAT—led by Louis Campbell (Head of the DevOps Team) and Brian Foley (Infrastructure and Internal Services Director)—expanded to project managers and other stakeholders who reviewed hundreds of issues and articles. This thoroughness surfaced and resolved nearly all issues prior to the cut-over, contributing to a seamless Monday morning go-live.

“The level of UAT from the TradingHub team was absolutely fabulous. The feedback meant subsequent iterations were continually better, and we were finding only minor issues right before go‑live. This thorough preparation resulted in a problem‑free production go‑live, which, in all my years of doing migrations, is an incredibly rare and desired outcome.”
— Matt Muschol, Eficode Consultant

 

Results and benefits: Faster audits, firm-wide adoption, and lower operational overhead

The migration delivered substantial operational and compliance value across the organization:

1. Streamlined security and compliance audits: By layering Jira with the Hedge Marketplace app to track risks, mitigating factors, and compensating controls—plus Entra ID integration—TradingHub achieved the visibility and accountability needed for audits like SOC 2. Audit information now takes about 30 minutes to compile, down from multiple days or weeks.
2. Firm‑wide adoption and Agile workflows: Non‑engineering teams now consolidate documentation in Confluence and track work in Jira, establishing a single source of truth. Engineering teams run two‑week Agile sprints with enforceable workflows.
3. Reduced maintenance overhead: Moving to SaaS eliminated infrastructure management, freeing DevOps to focus on feature delivery and business value.

“By implementing Jira, layered with the Hedge application, and leveraging the Entra ID integration, we have achieved the visibility required for audits like SOC 2. Getting this information now takes about 30 minutes, compared to multiple days or even weeks of work previously in GitLab.”
— Brian Foley, Infrastructure and Internal Services Director

Looking ahead: Extending automation, compliance insight, and platform maturity

With the Atlassian platform established across the business, TradingHub is positioned to maximize value through:

• Advanced automation and CI/CD: Leveraging native Atlassian capabilities to integrate Bitbucket and Jira for greater release velocity.
• Strategic upskilling and adoption: Ensuring finance, legal, and project management teams are trained on advanced reporting, tracking, and documentation features.
• Expansion of compliance tooling: Evaluating additional Marketplace apps and implementing advanced dashboards for real‑time assurance, extending the success of risk and controls tracking via Hedge.
  
  

Results at a glance: High-volume migration delivered with zero disruption and measurable compliance gains

• 45,745 issues, 330,136 comments, 90,176 attachments migrated
• 646,651 API calls executed; 69,814 bulk changes via CSV
• SOC 2 audit information gathering reduced from weeks to ~30 minutes
• Problem‑free production go‑live after ~40 iterative migration versions
• Firm‑wide Agile adoption and enforceable regulatory workflows
• Maintenance overhead eliminated and total cost of ownership reduced by moving to SaaS