Delete deactivated users from Atlassian cloud.

[r ghisa]

our company has a security and IAM hygiene practice to not only deactivate, but also delete identities from applications if users are not working at the company anymore. We also need to do this from a control and compliance perspective.

We are going to automate to delete deactivated users 30 days after they have offboarded from the company. 

Questions:

- is there any negative impact in removing users from a Jira or Confluence aspect, for example even when this deactivated users has a task assigned. ?

- are the audit logs preserved related with actions which this user in the past did ?

- what is the recommended security best practice in Atlassian cloud if the users are have offboarded from the company ?

[Trudy P Claspill]

Hello @r ghisa 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

When you permanently delete the Atlassian Cloud account for a user, everyplace that user account is referenced (page information, user selection fields, activity history, comments, etc.) will be changed to display "Former user". You will no longer have any record of where that user was used throughout your Jira and Confluence data.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/what-happens-when-an-account-is-deactivated-vs-deleted/

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/delete-your-account-962956972.html

The user's name will also be purged from application System Audit Logs and from the Organization level audit logs in compliance with GDPR.

[Tinker Fadoua]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community @r ghisa 

Why delete inactive users?

The don't count toward your licenses.

The one major problem you will face if there are any filters the inactive users have under their names will be broken once you delete them from Jira. You could affect reports as well.

Try first to check if inactive users have any filters, dashboards, under their name assign them to an active user then delete them.

Best,

Fadoua