Team '26 US: Master the four shifts of modern administration

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This is the fourth installment in a 5-part series highlighting the biggest Atlassian Platform announcements from Team '26 US:

1. The Atlassian Platform - Start your AI and cloud journey with the Atlassian Platform

2. Teamwork Graph & Rovo - Power AI with your organization's connected work context

3. Platform apps - Connect the dots for your organization

4. 📍Administration - Master the four shifts of modern administration

5. Enterprise-grade infrastructure - Scale confidently with new AI trust and governance controls

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🎁 Stick around to the end — we're giving away free Atlassian certification vouchers to two lucky commenters!

Hi Admins! 👋

I'm Betty, a Product Marketing Manager focused on Atlassian Administration. At Team '26 US, we shared a framework for running and growing your organization, built around four shifts every modern admin should master. If you were there in person, thank you for stopping by and sharing your valuable feedback!

From my conversations with admins, the same tensions keep coming up: you're trying to keep the org secure, set things up so they scale, and support teams to adopt new features, often with the same team you had two years ago. That is exactly why we introduced the four shifts to give you practical ways to streamline and scale that work.

In this post, I’ll break down each shift and the capabilities behind it. Think of this as your playbook for leading, protecting, and scaling your organization. Let’s get into it.

🎥 Watch the recording HERE (starting from 6:15). 

Shift 1: Shape your system of work by design

Every organization works differently, and as yours grows, so does the complexity of managing users, sites, and data. The challenge is that your app and user footprint can grow 3-10x, but your admin team typically stays the same size. You need tools to scale cleanly, ensure the right people have access to the right things, and keep data where it should be. Coming soon, these capabilities will help you do that intentionally, instead of patching things together as you go:

• [closed EAP] Units are a new Enterprise feature that lets you configure collaboration and data boundaries within your org. It ensures only the right people access the right data, which is critical for keeping AI experiences scoped to the correct context.

• 🆕 [coming soon] Footprint map gives you an interactive canvas that models your entire topology and every data connection. Whether you're planning a migration or a massive expansion, it helps you see, plan, and shape how teams work across your organization.

Shift 2: Secure your organization with guardrails

Growth is a major win, but it’s only sustainable when your security posture and business continuity can scale alongside it. In our admin interviews, we consistently hear that data protection and compliance are top priorities, and here's how to lock things down without becoming the bottleneck, across four key areas:

1. Securing users via provisioning, authentication, and advanced security

Starting with your users by automatically syncing your identity provider and ensuring everyone accessing your environment is verified. All [available now].

• SCIM provisioning

• Authentication policies

Learn more about Guard’s advanced user security capabilities.

2. Protecting your data with layers of protection

Put our four layers of defense to work. Click through the capabilities below to see how easy it is to secure your data. All [available now].

• Data classification

• Data security policies

• Threat detection and scanning

• Customer-managed keys (add-on feature)

Need to meet regional requirements?

• 🆕 [available now] Data residency lets you pin data to specific geographic locations across 11 regions. Additionally, it now includes coverage for organization-level data, giving you broader control over your compliance posture.

3. Ensure business continuity

Strong guardrails are just the beginning. With the right tools, you can shift from reactive to proactive. These tools help you see issues early and recover fast when they do. All [available now].

• System Health

• Backup and Restore

4. Manage change at your own pace

Nobody likes surprises in their production environments. With these change management essentials, you can control what reaches production and when. All [available now].

• App updates

• Sandboxes and multiple sandboxes

• Release tracks

• Freeze windows

With these guardrails in place, you can scale your org knowing that every layer, from user access to data protection to change management, will hold up, instead of creating more work.

Shift 3: Scale administration as a team

Admins are responsible for keeping their org running smoothly and securely, but the job keeps growing. What we hear most is that you need a way to scale yourself. If you've ever had to choose between giving someone full admin access or doing it all yourself, you know neither option works at scale.

That’s why we’re introducing built-in admin roles with specialized responsibilities, so you can hand off specific tasks to the right people without granting more access than they need. All [coming soon].

• 🆕 Unit admin is a dedicated role for managing users, apps, and policies within a unit, so the experts in that business area can help you administer. 

• 🆕 Security admin allows you to delegate security responsibilities to trusted administrators without granting full org-admin access.

• 🆕 Security reader gives internal and external stakeholders visibility into your security posture without the ability to change settings.

These are the first milestones toward more flexible roles, with the long-term goal being custom roles that match how your org operates.

Shift 4: Transform your business with AI you can trust

AI adoption is a balancing act: moving too fast exposes your org to risk, but stalling too long isn’t an option, either. Today, there are over 3 million monthly active AI users across the Atlassian platform, with usage doubling over the last 6 months. That's a lot of activity to govern if you don't have the right controls in place.

Here's what we announced at Team to help you roll out AI at a pace you're comfortable with, across three areas:

1. Access governance: Decide which apps and users get access to AI features like Rovo and Studio, so you control the scope from the start.

• [available now] With AI access controls, you can decide exactly where AI is enabled and who can use features like Rovo and Studio. Start with a pilot group, measure impact, and expand when ready.
• 🆕 [available now] Agent management controls let you decide who can create agents and which apps future agents can access by default, keeping agent sprawl and unscoped data access in check.

2. Data governance:

Govern data across three critical checkpoints: what comes in, what happens during the interaction, and what goes out, to ensure sensitive data stays protected at every stage. To learn more, check out: Team US '26: Scale confidently with new AI trust and governance controls.

3. Visibility & Insights:

AI activity shouldn't be a black box. These tools give you the visibility to answer “who's using it, how much, and is it actually helping?” so you can make informed decisions about where to invest next.

• 🆕 [coming soon] With our expanded Audit Log, you now have the visibility to see Rovo interactions, including Rovo chats, agent executions, and Guard enforcement events.

• 🆕 [open beta] To ensure the agents are driving value for your organization, Agent insights in Studio gives you a high-level, aggregated view of all agents and how they’re performing.

• 🆕 [available now] With the Platform usage dashboard, you can track credit consumption in real-time and use the usage forecasting tool to drive data-backed budget conversations.

• 🆕 [coming soon] In the near future, we’ll add tools to set usage limits and allocate allowances, so you can decide how credits are spent rather than reacting after the fact.

• 🆕 [open beta] Rovo Insights Impact tab shows how much time Rovo is freeing up for your teams to focus on strategic, high-value work.

That's the full picture: design your org structure, lock down security, scale your admin team, and govern AI with real visibility. Each shift builds on the last, so as your org grows, you're already setup for what comes next.

💬 We want to hear from you!

We'd love to hear from you! Tell us in the comments: Which of the four shifts resonates most with where your org is today, and what's one thing you're planning to tackle next?

🏆 Bonus: We’ll pick two lucky commenters to win a free Atlassian certification voucher, so you can earn a credential and level up your career. The winners will be randomly chosen and mentioned in the comments in 2 weeks. 

⏭️ Up next: Tune in to our Enterprise-grade infrastructure deep dive to explore the latest security, compliance, and administration features from Team Anaheim.

[John D Patton]

thank you for this breakdown of the 'four shifts' framework. As an often described Atlassian admin, I’ve seen firsthand how the complexity of scaling organizational structure and security can become a bottleneck without these types of proactive guardrails. The emphasis on scaling administration as a team—specifically through delegated roles like the new Unit and Security admins—is a much-needed evolution for managing enterprise-scale environments.

I’m particularly intrigued by the long-term vision for custom admin roles. Given the diverse governance needs across different industries, how do you envision the transition from these specialized built-in roles to a fully customizable framework? Specifically, for organizations currently utilizing the Footprint map to visualize their structure, are there best practices you'd recommend for aligning these visual maps with future granular permission sets to ensure we're building a scalable delegation model from the start?

Looking forward to seeing these capabilities evolve in a way that might further empower the admin community

[Josh]

@Betty Sheu it's nice to see some updates on "Units". After it was announced at TEAM '25, it seemed like there weren't any customer-facing announcements since then. Even when discussing with Atlassians, few people seemed to have even heard about "Units".

I'm really interested to see more about the Footprint Map. For example, it'd be immensely helpful if we could continue to expand / drill-through the map to see where agents, apps, connectors, and integrations live / operate. A view into technical dependencies would be super helpful as well, especially with a tie-in to system health. It would be great to be able to visualize (or have a Rovo agent explain) downstream impacts of an Atlassian outage or degraded performance event.

Agent identities and granular access controls are something I'm looking forward to exploring once available. The current approach of agents just inheriting human user permissions is a huge gap / blocker for large orgs and regulated industries to expand Rovo usage.

[Laura Jiménez Goicoechea]

As a PMO working closely with Atlassian administration and governance, the shift that resonates most with me is Shift 3: Scale administration as a team. As organizations grow, the demand for governance, security, and platform support increases much faster than admin capacity. The introduction of specialized roles like Unit Admin and Security Admin feels like a very practical step toward balancing control with delegation.

I'm also excited about Shift 4. AI adoption is becoming a strategic conversation across every portfolio, and having strong governance, auditability, and usage insights will be essential to drive trust and demonstrate business value. The expanded Audit Log, Agent Insights, and usage forecasting capabilities are particularly interesting from a PMO perspective because they support data-driven decision-making and change management.

Great overview of the four shifts! Looking forward to seeing how these capabilities evolve! 🚀