Get the flexibility you need from Atlassian’s multiple authentication policies

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Hi Atlassian Community,

This is Narmada Jayasankar, and I am a Principal Product Manager on the Atlassian Access team. I’m excited to announce the rollout of multiple authentication policies! The flexibility you get from authentication policies helps you manage security for different subsets of users in your company. This new feature is available to Atlassian Access subscribers.

If you administer your organization under admin.atlassian.com, read on to understand how authentication policies help you achieve your security goals, how to use them in your organization, and how to try them out.

Feel the power of authentication policies

As someone in charge of administering security, you need a flexible way to manage the diverse security needs of your company and its users. You also want control over your users' authentication settings to keep your company's data secure.

Atlassian’s multiple authentication policies give you that flexibility and control you’re looking for, making it easier to secure your users and products. In fact, you’re able to set up security settings for user subsets of Atlassian products in your Atlassian organization.

An organization provides a central place for administering your users and products at Atlassian. As an organization admin, you manage the Atlassian accounts of your users and the products that belong to your Atlassian organization.

Apply multiple authentication policies to your organization

Atlassian’s authentication policies allow you to:

• designate policies to specific subsets of users

• test authentication settings

• review and manage authentication settings from one place in your organization

Authentication policies also secure all your Atlassian products in the cloud. You’ll need an Atlassian Access subscription to create multiple authentication policies. Learn more about Atlassian Access

Achieve security goals by tackling different security needs

Your different security tiers cut across a broad range of users you support, from the C-Suite to full-time staff to bot/service accounts and more. Atlassian’s authentication policies give you the flexibility to configure different policies for each subset of users.

As your user base grows, you can slowly add more users to policies, deciding along the way which users belong in which tier of security.

Roll out authentication settings at your own pace

You can easily test settings in your Atlassian organization before you roll them out to your whole company. Testing settings on a small group before rolling them out to the whole organization will give you confidence about your security settings.

Here are a few examples of what you can test:

• Single sign-on for a smaller subset of users to ensure it’s set up correctly

• Two-step verification for admin test accounts so they can log in and troubleshoot errors in the configuration

• Idle session duration to comply with company guidelines or industry regulations

Manage authentication settings across your organization

In your organization, you manage products and users that you need to secure. When you’re ready to apply those security settings, you can find them under Security> Authentication policies in your Atlassian organization. Since you can set up and check your settings from one place instead of several places, it is easier for you to manage your organization's security.

Here are the authentication settings that you can enforce in your Atlassian organization:

• SAML or G Suite single sign-on

• two-step verification

• password requirements (strength, expiration)

• idle session duration

Tailor security settings for your organization

You can tailor Atlassian’s authentication policies to address your unique security needs by creating policies with different settings. Here’s a sample of some of the security challenges that authentication policies can solve:

• You only want to enable single sign-on for certain users

• You only want to enforce two-step verification for admins so they can securely log in to fix single sign-on issues for your users

• You want to create different policies for different domains

• You provision users with your identity provider and want to designate an authentication policy for newly provisioned users

• You test a SAML configuration with a few users, and once the test policy is working, you can change and rename the policy and apply it to all users

From admin.atlassian.com, you can view all of your policies and their settings:

We’d love to hear what you think

We believe the flexibility that authentication policies offer will make it easier for you to manage the security of your users. We’d love to hear how you plan to use them and what you think. Let us know in the comments. And if you’d like to get started with multiple authentication policies, you’ll need an Atlassian Access subscription. Learn more about Atlassian Access

[Tobias Mucke]

Dear Narmada,

I appreciate the ability of Atlassian Access to provide different Authentication Policies while at the same time keeping configuration simple.

What I'm looking for is an ability to automate assignment of policies to members. I've an environment with thousands of users where one half is able to do SSO (their accounts are provided by an Cloud based identity provider) while the other half is not able to do SSO.

Due to the number of users I would like to avoid manual assignment via CVS bulk upload. Using a REST API is an option to me. I already have experience with user provisioning through the SCIM REST API.

Thanks for your advice.

Kind regards,

Tobias