Can I ensure staff are only able to create an account via SSO? And how will this impact vendors?

Question

My organization currently uses Jira Software and it is in the trial period for Confluence and JSM implementation. We have 140+ staff that will be using JSM; however, we are trying to limit the number of licensed users so we're treating them as customers (if I understand correctly, these types of users do not require a license in order to access the JSM portal).

We decided to implement SSO so that everyone can use their Microsoft credentials to create an account in Jira. So we have decided to implement Atlassian Access for that purpose. My question is, can we prevent staff from creating an account without SSO? This way, once a staff person leaves the org, they're no longer able to access Jira once their Microsoft credentials are revoked.

Another question - we sometimes invite external vendors outside of our org to Jira Software. Will implementing SSO-only login impact our ability to work with vendors in Jira?

Connor_lld39i · Accepted Answer

Hi @Arlene.Amaya yes with Atlassian Access you'll be able to setup user provisioning and SSO from your Microsoft tenant, and have it locked down so users are not able to create an account. That is exactly how my company has our Atlassian org setup. Users are added to a security group(s) in Azure AD which triggers the user provisioning process in Atlassian, and allows them to login to Jira with their Microsoft credentials via SSO. When a user is removed from the security group, their Atlassian account is suspended which removes their access.

Inviting external vendors shouldn't be affected. You can set it so they can still be invited, there's lots of options for that. If you add them as a guest within Azure AD, you can even configure user provisioning to sync the security group they're added to, and set their Atlassian product access/user roles based on the synced security group. However you provided them access, they still won't be a managed account like your internal users, so they won't be affected by any authentication policies you setup. i.e. you can't enforce 2FA, password strength, etc.

Take a look through some of this Atlassian documentation for further details:

* Provision and sync users to your organization
* Understand authentication policies
* Configure SAML single sign-on with an identity provider
* Understand external user security (Note: These settings are in early access only, I included this as a sneak peek of what's coming.)