Authentication vs authorization

[Gary Bucher]

Based on the documentation, it appears that Atlassian Access provides services to integrate organization authentication and user provisioning.  

I'm interesting in how authorization is granted in tools, does Atlassian Access provide any group functionality?  For example, can I create groups in Atlassian Access and use the group to provide authorization within multiple tools (Jira, Confluence etc...)? 

Does Atlassian Access allow groups from Active Directory to be used for authorization?

Can existing groups that exist in Crowd be migrated or used with Atlassian Access?

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @Gary Bucher ,

Yes, check out the documentation for user provisioning, which is a feature of Atlassian Access. User provisioning allows you to sync groups that are managed in your external identity provider (like Azure AD, Okta, Onelogin, and others). These groups are then made available in all sites that are linked to your organization.

From there, you can use these groups like any other group (managing access to the product, permissions in Jira and Confluence at any level, etc.)

All cloud identity providers provider integration capabilities with on-premises Active Directory.

We don't support direct data migration from Crowd, but there are basically two paths:

1. If you have groups in an internal Crowd directory, there are some complex solutions but it's generally advised to recreate the groups.

2. If your groups in Crowd are in an external directory, you can connect that directory to your cloud identity provider, which can then sync those groups to Atlassian cloud, as described above.

Hope this helps!

Dave