Anonymous & IP whitelist plan - content available only for internal users

Question

Hello,
we are faced with the question of whether it is possible, in addition to licensed employees, to grant a number of employees only reading rights for Confluence content (Cloud) without requiring additional licenses (Anonymous).
However, it would be imperative that all of our Confluence content is only accessible internally and not publicly on the internet.
While searching for an answer I came across the following reference in the Atlassian support documentation.
Cloud only - IP whitelisted plans
If you allow anonymous access to the cloud, your content will be made available to all internet users. However, it is possible to further restrict this through IP whitelist rules configured for your cloud site. This makes it possible to make content available only to users on a private network or VPN.

Would this be the right approach and has anyone had any experience with it?

Thanks

O.Diessner · Answer

First of all, thank you for your feedback !

Our company is currently still using the server variants for Confluence, Jira etc. and are now trying to find out how to secure the confluence pages in the cloud variant.
Only a certain area of the company should have access to Confluence pages (around 400 users). And about 25 of them are licensed users.

I hope our IT can do something with all the information.

John Price_aiexq9 · Answer

We haven't used the IP allowlisting due to the size of our firm and thus complexity of maintaining the list, but it might work for you depending on the number of entries.

We've been after Atlassian to offer some way to allow a small Confluence-using group (let's say 1000 users) to share links for read purposes with a much larger org that generally doesn't use Confluence (let's say 30,000 people).  External collaboration is coming but not sure about something for internal users.

Our solution has been to stay on Data Center and force people onto VPN with anonymous access enabled, but we don't like that (Cloud is a better product).

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The documentation is correct.  Yes, anonymous access means "anyone can see it".  Yes, Cloud systems are available to the whole world.

Whitelisting will do what you want, it's a separate mechanism.  It says "only let me be seen from <range of IP addresses>".  It doesn't care about anonymous or logins, but what it does do is say "unless this connection is named in my list, they're not getting anything".  If you put your office network and VPN on the list, and nothing else, then only people on your office network or using your VPN would be able to see Confluence.  (And then you can look at the anonymous access - it would still be allowing anyone, but they'd have to be in your office or on your VPN)