Do you need Atlassian Guard as an additional standalone product if you have TWC Premium?

[Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_]

Hello everybody,

on monday we switched from standalone products to TWC Premium. 

As I found out in Atlassian pricing Guard Standard should be included in TWC Premium (Teamwork Collection Pricing: Apps and agents to supercharge teamwork | Atlassian)

After switching to TWC everything seems to work correct. The only thing is, that there are no users anymore in our standalone-Guard.

Does anybody have expirence what to do with standalone-Guard after switching from standalone products to TWC Premium? Can the standalone-Guard be deactivated?

Apparently, the functions are active, so the renewal of Guard would then be double.

Thank you in advance and best regards

Carsten

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ · Accepted solution]

Hello, @Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_ 

From my experience the response from Atlassian is wrong. 

They focused too much on "required" and not on the actual policy they (Atlassian) has.

Guard subscription hidden inside TWC Premium only covers users who have TWC licenses.

There could be other users from your claimed domain out there, which you won't see if you don't have a Guard subscription.

For this reason, Atlassian gives a FREE subscription to Guard on top of TWC Premium with user tier at 10% for that for TWC, rounded up (so if your TWC is 600, you will get Guard Standard 100 for free). 

I would suggest you quote this answer and go back to re-confirm before you cancel your Guard subscription.

Every single customer of ours has this. We've done a lot of conversions to TWC. And these free 10% do come useful.

Yes, at renewal time, Atlassian billing system is not smart enough to recognise that this is a free subscription and will try to bill you – so you reach out to support and ask them to zero it out.

[Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_]

Hello @Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ 

thank you for you answer. As things stand this morning, I can confirm that.

A quick note: the comment from Atlassian pointed out that a separate Guard subscription is required if there continue to be users outside of TWC. ;-)

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

@Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_ I am not sure about "separate" as in "additional" to the 10% free one they gave already.

You can only have one Guard subscription in an Org so that by definition is not going to fly.

What will most likely happen if you exceed the 10% (rounded up to the closest annual Guard tier) allowance with the actual use (e.g. SSO for these users) – they will want you to pay for the whole subscription (including the 10% that was previously free).

[Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_ · Accepted solution]

Sometimes topics evolve more quickly than expected. I have received the following statement from Atlassian on this matter:

With TWC Premium, Atlassian Guard Standard is already included in the subscription. This means that as soon as all users for whom Guard features such as SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, or security policies are relevant are licensed via TWC Premium, no separate, additional Guard subscription is required anymore. From the users’ perspective, it can then be canceled without any loss of functionality.

A separate Guard subscription is only required if there continue to be users outside of TWC Premium who need Guard features (e.g., Jira- or Confluence-only users, Service Collection users, etc.).

I hope this information is helpful for you. If you have had similar or different experiences, I’d be happy to hear your feedback in the comments.