Atlassian Government Cloud Just Got Smarter About Retention

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tl;dr Content Retention Manager for Confluence (and Jira) is now Atlassian Government Cloud approved. 🎉

Over the past year, I’ve been talking with a lot of public-sector teams who are excited about Atlassian Government Cloud and also concerned about migrating off Data Center while also quietly worried about records management.

Atlassian Government Cloud achieving FedRAMP Moderate solves the where question (a secure, authorized home for content and sensitive data). But it doesn’t automatically solve the how long and then what questions for all the pages, tickets, and knowledge articles you’re creating every day.

 For US government agencies, the Federal Records Act and NARA’s regulations in 36 CFR Chapter XII Subchapter B require you to create and preserve adequate and proper documentation of your work, including electronic records in tools like Jira and Confluence. NARA’s Universal ERM Requirements and FERMI initiative then add the expectation that those systems can classify records, apply retention schedules, support search/FOIA, and handle final disposition or transfer in compliant formats. 

At the same time, OMB/NARA M-23-07 pushes agencies to manage permanent and temporary records in electronic format – not in a separate paper or legacy archive.  That means the content already living in Atlassian becomes part of your official recordkeeping universe, not a side channel.

If you’re a government contractor, you’re dealing with a similar set of obligations from the other side of the table. FAR Subpart 4.7 requires contractors to retain contract-related records (including electronic records) for at least three years after final payment, with longer periods for certain categories.  Many agencies also include explicit NARA/FRA language in contracts, making the contractor responsible for inventories, safeguarding, and end-of-contract disposition of federal records stored in their systems. 

That’s a lot of responsibility for what often looks like “just” project tickets or collaboration pages.

Content Retention Manager is your easy Government Cloud approved solution to bridge this gap in Confluence and Jira.

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What Atlassian Government Cloud solves (and doesn't)

 Atlassian Government Cloud gives agencies and industry partners a FedRAMP Moderate authorized environment for Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence, built separately from the commercial cloud to support CUI and other sensitive unclassified workloads. 

✅ It answers questions like:

“Can we put this data in Atlassian at all?”

“Will our security and ATO teams sign off on this environment?”

🔴 But records officers, legal, and compliance teams still need an answer to:

“How do we actually enforce NARA and FAR-aligned retention, archival, and deletion on Atlassian content?”

Introducing Content Retention Manager for Atlassian Government Cloud

 That’s the gap we built Content Retention Manager to fill, and we’re excited to now support Atlassian Government Cloud. With Content Retention Manager installed in your Government Cloud site, you can:

• Classify Jira and Confluence content (records vs non-records, series, sensitivity levels) and align those to agency retention schedules or NARA GRS (and more) categories. 

• Define policy-driven retention rules (e.g., “keep all system change records for 7 years after closure,” “retain policy pages for 3 years after superseded”) and apply them at scale, not page by page. 

• Delegated Admin capabilities so you can have non-Confluence/Jira admins manage your classification and retention policies as a way to offset the burden.

• • Archive records for limited access/long-term retrieval when required

  • Permanently delete content when the schedule calls for a full purge

    Enforce disposition decisions:

• Place legal and FOIA holds on content so it’s not inadvertently deleted while under investigation, litigation, or request review.

• Maintain immutable audit logs of policy changes and disposition actions – critical when auditors, IGs, or courts ask, “Who changed this rule and when?” 

• Export record sets in NARA-compatible formats to your designated records system or transfer mechanism when needed. 

In other words, Atlassian Government Cloud gives you the authorized platform, and Content Retention Manager turns it into a records-aware platform that behaves the way NARA and FAR expect. 

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 Who this is for

 We’ve designed this with three main groups in mind:

• Federal agencies moving collaboration, service management, and project workflows into Atlassian Government Cloud, and needing to keep their Records Officer and CIO on the same page.

• Government contractors and integrators who must meet FAR 4.7 retention requirements while supporting agency-driven schedules, audits, and end-of-contract disposition. 

• State & local governments and education using Atlassian in environments influenced by sunshine/public-records laws and sector-specific retention schedules.

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Let’s compare notes

If you’re already on Atlassian Government Cloud (or planning a migration) and wrestling with NARA schedules, FAR retention, FOIA, or CUI, I’d love to hear how you’re handling records today:

• Are Jira/Confluence considered “official” systems of record in your organization?

• Do you have clear retention rules for Atlassian content today, or is it mostly “keep everything forever”?

• What are your records officer / legal teams asking for that Atlassian doesn’t do out of the box?

Reply here or DM me if you’d like to see how Content Retention Manager works in a Government Cloud site. We’re happy to do a walkthrough and talk about how to align it with your specific NARA schedules and contract requirements. You can also read more on how we help data retention for the public sector and adjacent.