Is the best way to have Executive Management use Jira to create a separate cloud instance?

Question

The software team is using a cloud instance of Jira.  However, as far as I know there is no way to totally hide a project and its board from admin users of Jira.  If I create a project and board for the Executive team to use with company confidential information, is there a way to protect me (admin) from seeing it?  If someone else creates a project and board on a separate cloud instance of Jira and have someone on the Executive team administer it, then this would work I think. Any ideas? The software team is trying to get the entire company to use Jira to track all projects and initiatives for the company.

Larry Roundy_yprjhj · Answer

Daniel, Thanks for your reply.  I think we will have to go with a separate cloud instance and the CTO who also knows how to admin Jira do it for that instance.

Daniel Ebers · Answer

Hi Larry,

if I understood you correctly the basic question is if you can hide element like a dashboard or a Scrum/Kanban boards from admins.

Yes and no - you could setup your permission scheme in a way the admin group does not see issues but they are able any time to grant themselves the rights - this is due to the nature of an admins duty. They must be able to debug several configuration questions and therefore it is the group that has the most powerful permissions - mostly throughout the whole company.

The idea, if understood right, is to place a separate cloud instance where the admin group has no access to. Apart from the circumstance that this would enquire a lot of extra work (it still must be managed somehow - and maintained) I doubt this will work out for every aspect that is needed to get a well structured base of information.

You surely could use Application Links to link to a different Jira instance in cloud.
But there will be situations where the deep integration will be missing - contrary to a scenario where data is on the same instance.

Without wanting to take the topic where it should not be my personal recommendation would be to trust the admin in a way - at least with the decent note that violating corporate rules can have very serious effects on the person.

From a technical point of view I'd suggest to keep it simple - you still can look into Permission Schemes like advised above.
Also Issue Security (to hide single issues from individuals but not a whole project) could contribute.

Regards,
Daniel