Air-gapped / sovereign deployment guide

Air-Gapped Isn't a Feature — It's a Constraint

Most “Jira alternative” comparisons treat air-gapped as a checkbox next to on-premises. It isn't. It's a claim about whether a platform's entire performance surface — not just the parts someone remembered to test — actually works with zero outbound connectivity, on Data Center's own clock.

No scoping call required — price a self-managed estate against your own footprint right now.

Mar 30, 2026

Already past

New DC sales closed

Mar 30, 2028

The real planning deadline

Existing-customer purchases close

Mar 28, 2029

Atlassian's own terminal date

Full end-of-life, read-only

Same date

Sales cutoffs differ; EOL doesn't

Bitbucket Data Center

Can Jira Cloud Run in an Air-Gapped Environment?

No. Jira Cloud, Confluence Cloud, and Jira Service Management Cloud are SaaS products — they run on Atlassian's infrastructure, not yours, and they assume outbound internet reachability by design. There is no configuration, plan tier, or add-on that changes this. An administrator who needs a clear answer to this exact question will not find one stated plainly on Atlassian's own pricing or product pages, which is exactly why it's worth stating here.

The most common well-intentioned wrong answer is that IP allowlisting solves this. It doesn't, and the distinction is worth being precise about: IP allowlisting is a Premium and Enterprise capability that restricts which networks can reach a Cloud service that still lives on the public internet. It is an inbound control. An air gap means the service has no route out at all. A tenancy with IP allowlisting enabled is not air-gapped — it's a public cloud service with a guest list, and an admin who treats the two as equivalent will find out they aren't during an audit, not before one.

Why This Is a Gate, Not a Preference

For most buyers leaving Jira, deployment model is a cost-and-control decision — self-managed versus a vendor's cloud, weighed against price and convenience. For a regulated, classified, or genuinely disconnected estate, it isn't a decision at all. A platform that assumes internet reachability — for licensing, for search, for identity, for updates — is disqualified by policy before a feature comparison even starts. The question this page answers isn't “which tool is best” — it's what has to be true of any tool before that question is even worth asking.

Three Different Reasons to Be Reading This

“Self-managed” covers three distinct situations, and conflating them is how vague vendor copy happens. Worth placing yourself in one before reading further:

Data residency & sovereignty

The data has to stay in a specific place, under a specific jurisdiction. This is a policy preference with real teeth, but the network can still reach the internet — the constraint is where data lives, not whether it's ever connected.

Regulatory & contractual constraints

Finance, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector often can't hand this data to a third party at all, by law or by contract — regardless of region or encryption. No cloud tenancy clears this bar, because the constraint is about custody, not geography.

Air-gapped & high-security environments

If the network has no path to the internet, a cloud tool is disqualified on day one — not because of policy, but because of physics. This is the category the rest of this page is written for.

What “Air-Gapped” Actually Requires

For the third category above — genuinely disconnected networks — four things have to hold, and a feature checklist checks none of them. Verifying these against any platform — GForge included — takes longer than reading a comparison table, and that's the point: this is a boundary to test, not a box to tick.

Zero outbound connectivity, not just a firewall rule

Search indexing, license checks, telemetry, crash reporting, and update checks all have to run with no external call succeeding — ever, not just when the network happens to be down. A platform that degrades gracefully without internet access is not the same as one built to never expect it.

No vendor-held encryption keys

If the platform vendor can decrypt your content from outside your network — for support, for recovery, for anything — the estate isn't air-gapped no matter where the servers physically sit. Key custody has to stay inside the boundary, full stop.

Identity resolved entirely on-prem

Authentication against a local LDAP or SAML provider, with no callout to a cloud identity service as a fallback path. A login flow that silently reaches outside the network the moment the local IdP has a bad day is a hole in the boundary, not an outage.

Offline software updates and licensing

License files and patches delivered as artifacts an admin carries across the boundary by hand — not an activation flow that phones home, and not a licensing model that assumes periodic internet contact to stay valid.

The Clock Doesn't Care Whether You're Connected

Atlassian's own wind-down of Data Center runs on three dates, regardless of a customer's network posture: March 30, 2026, when new Data Center sales and self-service trials stopped; March 30, 2028, when existing customers lose the ability to purchase, renew, or expand impacted products; and March 28, 2029, when those licenses expire and go read-only. An air-gapped estate does not get a longer runway because it's harder to migrate — if anything, the opposite: evaluating, procuring, and re-accrediting a replacement inside a disconnected or classified network routinely takes longer than a standard migration, which makes the 2028 date the one to plan against now, not the 2029 date most coverage leads with. Full breakdown of all three dates and what each one actually closes off →

The One Exception Worth Getting Right

Bitbucket Data Center is excluded from the 2026 and 2028 sales cutoffs that hit Jira, Confluence, and the rest of Data Center — but not from the March 28, 2029 date itself. Atlassian's own Bitbucket Hybrid License page states that standalone Bitbucket Data Center licensing ends that same day and the application goes read-only. For an air-gapped estate this matters more than it would elsewhere: the only supported continuation past that date, the Bitbucket Hybrid License, requires an active Bitbucket Cloud subscription — which a genuinely disconnected network cannot run. Treating Bitbucket as permanently exempt is the single most common factual error in this space, and getting it wrong in front of a security or procurement reviewer costs credibility the rest of the case can't buy back. What the Bitbucket exception actually covers, and what it doesn't →

Air-Gapped Is Not the Same Problem as Data Residency

Choosing which region hosts your cloud tenancy and disconnecting entirely from the internet are different problems with different solutions, and it's worth being precise about which one an organization actually has. Data residency controls are a cloud feature — a setting inside a connected, vendor-run tenancy that pins data to a region, with real gaps of its own. What Atlassian's own data residency page does and doesn't cover → A genuine air-gap requirement isn't solved by picking a region — it's solved by removing the connection entirely, which no commercial cloud tenancy, regardless of region, is built to do.

Migrations at This Scale Are Not Theoretical

The policy case above is only half the question — the other half is whether a migration of real size is actually survivable. OpenText, a publicly traded enterprise software company, reports moving 7,000 engineers and over five million records off Jira onto its own self-managed platform, with “zero missed release cycles” by its own account. Treat that as self-reported and unaudited — it is the company's own description of its own migration, not an independent study — but it is still the clearest public evidence available that a migration this size is something organizations actually complete, not just plan.

An Architecture That Meets the Constraint

GForge Next runs entirely inside infrastructure you control — no vendor-held keys, no phone-home licensing, identity resolved against your own directory. It's one architecture that satisfies the requirement above, not the only one, and it's worth verifying against your own boundary rather than taking that claim on faith.

Size My Instance

Sources

Last verified: September 2026. Drawn from Atlassian's own end-of-life documentation and community post. Re-verify dates directly at atlassian.com before relying on this page in a compliance or procurement review.