With Cloud use on the rise, ensuring the security of your data and users is non-negotiable. While Cloud platforms such as Atlassian Cloud offer robust collaboration and productivity solutions, its security is relatively basic. Ensuring your environment is fully protected can require careful planning and the right tools. Fortunately, Atlassian offers a powerful cloud security add-on designed for data protection, user management, and threat detection called Atlassian Guard. In this blog, we will explore how Atlassian Guard can help secure your cloud environment.
What is Atlassian Guard?
Atlassian Guard is a subscription-based security solution that integrates seamlessly with your Atlassian Cloud products. This includes Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Atlassian Guard offers two tiers:
- Atlassian Guard Standard: Focuses on foundational security needs like single sign-on (SSO), user provisioning, two-step verification, and API token management.
- Atlassian Guard Premium: Builds on the Standard plan by adding advanced features such as data classification, sensitive data detection, threat alerts, and extended audit logs.
Your organization’s needs can determine which solution is right for you. Regardless, the capabilities of both offerings empower organizations to protect their users and secure data. They do this by detecting and responding to threats, and monitoring organizational activity with precision.
Best Practices for Securing Your Atlassian Cloud
While some of these practices can be implemented without utilizing Atlassian Guard, the add-on provides an added level of security. Here are a few best practices for securing your Atlassian Cloud environment.
Implement Robust User Authentication
Implementing user authentication ensures no one from outside your organization (or in some cases, your team) can access your data. This can be implemented through:
- Single Sign-On (SSO): Streamline access by enabling SSO through your organization’s identity provider. This reduces the need for multiple passwords and enhances security.
- Two-Step Verification: Enforce two-factor authentication to add an extra layer of security for user accounts.
- Authentication Policies: Customize policies to control access methods for internal and external users, ensuring only authorized individuals can interact with your data.
Streamline User Management
In addition to authenticating users, your business can ensure proper security of your data by providing and revoking user access. This can be accomplished in one of two ways:
- User Provisioning: Automatically synchronize users and groups with your identity provider. This ensures that when employees leave, their access is immediately revoked, reducing risk.
- API Token Management: Monitor and revoke API tokens to prevent unauthorized access to your Atlassian environment.
Protect Data with Classification and Policies
Another great way to protect your data is by ensuring it is organized and your business has specific policies in place to inform users of its importance.
- Data Classification: Label sensitive data within Confluence spaces or Jira projects to improve governance.
- Data Security Policies: Control actions such as data export, public access, or anonymous access to minimize the risk of data loss.
Monitor and Respond to Threats
It is also important to track and monitor any threats to your data security.
- Threat Detection: Use Guard Premium to identify suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access or data exfiltration, and generate alerts for immediate response.
- Audit Logs: Track admin and user activity across your organization to maintain transparency and accountability. Integrate these logs with third-party monitoring tools for enhanced oversight.
Managing Permissions
When using Atlassian Guard as an organization admin, you can add people who are not organization admins to Guard Detect. Guard Detect admin can access data about an actor or subject in an alert or in the actor profile. This is useful for investigating threats so your team can quickly mitigate them. These are not the only important permissions when it comes to security. As a collaboration hub, Confluence is often home to sensitive and mission-critical data. Effectively managing Confluence permissions is key to maintaining security while fostering collaboration.
Global Permissions
Global permissions allow you to define who can create spaces, access user profiles, and interact with apps across your Confluence site. To manage these:
- Navigate to Settings → Global Permissions.
- Assign or revoke permissions for user groups and save changes.
- Ensure that only authorized users can create new spaces and manage site-wide configurations.
Space Permissions
For more granular control, set permissions at the space level:
- Go to the specific space → Space Settings → Permissions.
- Assign roles (view, comment, create, or edit) based on user or group needs.
- Limit access to sensitive content like payroll or legal documents to key stakeholders.
- Consider enabling anonymous access for self-help content, but restrict editing and commenting to internal teams.
Key Benefits of Atlassian Guard
While we dove deeper into Atlassian Guard for Confluence, Atlassian Guard has benefits across the entire Atlassian Cloud ecosystem. It offers comprehensive user protection with SSO and two-step verification. Furthermore, it controls data access, prevents data loss, and helps manage sensitive content with its advanced security policies. In addition to this, Atlassian Guard proactively identifies risks with its threat monitoring features. It allows users to take action to secure their cloud environment. Lastly, Atlassian Guard helps maintain an open and productive workspace in tools like Confluence and Jira while securing sensitive content.
Secure Your Atlassian Cloud Environment with Atlassian Guard
Securing your Atlassian Cloud environment is critical to protecting your organization’s data and maintaining trust among users. Atlassian Guard provides the tools you need to manage user accounts, safeguard sensitive information, and respond to threats effectively. Whether you need the foundational protection of Guard Standard or the advanced capabilities of Guard Premium, investing in your organization’s security is a step toward long-term success. If you are ready to secure your environment, contact our experts to implement Atlassian Guard today.
