Is it important to have Atlassian Guard in my Cloud target instance?

Sergio Abdallah Rios Ramos_z6cnuz

I am wondering if Atlassian Guard is necessary to have in my Cloud target instance? 

I will give you a bit context about my case; I have my Jira Data Center instance, actually I have started my Assessment with JCMA (I have the instance assessment completed). Than, in my DC instance, I have my user management Delegated to an LDAP Auth and I have Microsoft Azure Active Directory SSO for Jira installed. So, in my Cloud target instance I only have Jira, Zephyr, Confluence, and Bitbucket, Atlassian Guard was not considered (Idk why!) and this makes me wonder; 

- Not having Atlassian Guard in Cloud target instance could be a migration blocker?

- If Atlassian Guard was not considered in Cloud, What would be the main cons of this?

- (if applies) On those cons, How could I turn those cons around? 

I hope someone has gone through something like this, and tell me how managed to resolve it. 

Ben Spillane

Hi @Sergio Abdallah Rios Ramos

In addition to the answers provided so far, I'd like to offer my thoughts as well as I've not that long ago faced the same scenarios at work.

"Not having Atlassian Guard in Cloud target instance could be a migration blocker?"

A: Not having Guard is absolutely not a blocker. However, you should ensure the "decision makers" have a clear understanding of what features will and won't be available in the cloud with your current list of planned subscriptions. For example, the assumption that users will continue to have a seamless login experience post migration (without Guard) would be a false assumption.

"If Atlassian Guard was not considered in Cloud, What would be the main cons of this?"

A: If Atlassian Guard isn't adopted in the cloud you'd not have access to the features Brant and Mikael mentioned. The real world impact of not having Atlassian Guard features probably affects the organisation more than the end user experience. For example, 

• You'd no longer have the ability to leverage and enforce SSO
  • A worthy mitigation would be that you'd have ability to enable "Third party sign-in / social" login options. So users could sign in with their authenticated Microsoft Credentials, thus giving the impression of SSO. But this becomes the users choice, not policy.
• Without Guard the level of auditing you'd have access to would differ substantially to what's available in Data Center. (Depending on your industry, the absence of user level action auditing COULD become the catalyst that bumps Guard from being optional to essential)
• Again, depending on your industry, the availability of advanced security features such as Data Classification and threat detection could also become a significant con.

"(if applies) On those cons, How could I turn those cons around?" 

A: If your organisation has particular requirements around auditing, data loss prevention controls or more formal data classification features, then the decision is simple; you essentially require Atlassian Guard Premium.

The additional benefits of SSO and SCIM syncing with Microsoft Entra / Azure AD do carry substantial benefits when having to manage user accounts. Currently your DC setup with LDAP and MS offer this. When you move to cloud each user will receive a global Atlassian Cloud identity tied to their email address. Without Guard+SSO+SCIM you'll effectively have no simple way of reconciling the Atlassian + Microsoft user accounts.

• That's the long way of saying Atlassian Guard enables effective account management for organisations.

I hope this additional info. answers your questions, or is informative at minimum.  

Regards, 

Ben