Why isn't this sudo mv operation with wildcard working?

It's almost certainly due to the fact that your ordinary user account cannot access the directory, so the shell cannot enumerate the files that would match the wildcard.

You can confirm this easily enough with a command like this

ls /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins

If you get a permission denied then there is no way the shell is going to be able to expand a * wildcard in that directory.

Why? Consider your command

sudo mv /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/* /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/plugins/installed-plugins/                                                                       

The order of processing is (1) expand the wildcards, (2) execute the command, which in this case is sudo with some arguments that happen to correspond to a mv statement.

You can solve the problem in one of two ways

1. Become root and then move the files

    sudo -s
    mv /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/* /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/plugins/installed-plugins/                    
   

2. Expand the wildcard after running sudo

    sudo bash -c "mv /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/* /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/plugins/installed-plugins/"
   

As you do sudo ls to list the folder, I assume one or more directories in the path are unreadable by regular users. That would explain the behaviour. The key misunderstanding here is when glob expansion of the * is done. It is done by the shell, before invoking any command. If the shell does not have permissions enough, it can not expand it.

What happens in this case in more detail is:

1. Your shell tries to expand the command line. Since you do not have the right to read /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins as yourself, it will not be able to expand the glob pattern /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/*. It will leave it unmodified. After this stage, * is no longer special.
2. Your shell invokes the command sudo with the arguments mv /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/*, and /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/plugins/installed-plugins/
3. sudo invokes mv with the arguments /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/*, and /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/plugins/installed-plugins/
4. mv tries to move a file actually named /home/jira-plugins/installed-plugins/*, but it doesn't exist and thus the error message.