Lighting the way forward: the transition from Beacon to Atlassian Guard

[#1]

Hi there Beacon community,

Last year, we launched the Beacon beta program in response to your expanding cloud security needs so that you could mitigate risks to your Atlassian cloud data with threat detection and response capabilities. This was a big milestone on our cloud security journey, building upon the popularity of Atlassian Access, which many of you have relied on for years.

Through the beta program, we learned about how customers like you were using Beacon’s threat detection capabilities, such as content scanning and alerting capabilities to successfully eliminate the need to do time-consuming, whole-site scanning for credit card numbers in Confluence pages. Customers were also able to evaluate risk and make well-informed decisions to address malicious activity with alert investigations. Thanks to all of your invaluable feedback and enthusiastic embrace of Beacon, we’re excited to share that Beacon functionality will soon be moving from beta to limited availability and later to general availability as part of our newest security offering.

Today, at Team '24, we announced Atlassian Guard, which marks our next chapter in cloud security and a big step forward as we continue to work towards our original vision of helping customers secure their most critical work. Atlassian Guard unifies existing Access and Beacon beta capabilities and brand-new data loss prevention functionality into one product with two plans.

• Atlassian Guard Standard gives you all of the Access capabilities you know and love, with seamless authentication & authorization and enhanced visibility & auditing.
• Atlassian Guard Premium builds upon current Atlassian Guard Standard and the Beacon beta capabilities and goes even further with data loss prevention, expanded threat detection & investigation, and robust audit logging.

This new name reflects both our current cloud security capabilities and our future direction. While the name ‘Access’ is changing, the pace at which we are delivering on our roadmap is not. You’ll continue to see us invest in capabilities that provide the flexibility and control you need to protect your data - such as enforced SSO for external users, automatic product discovery improvements, and expanded data & mobile security policies. With Atlassian Guard, you’ll continue to be able to extend the built-in security and admin capabilities of our cloud platform as we expand integrations beyond identity providers, like Okta and Google, to include other best-in-class security tools, ranging from SIEMs to DLP, like Zscaler.

What does this mean for me?

• Current beta program participants will continue to have access to the Beacon beta program until further notice; however, the in-product UI will change to Atlassian Guard on June 12, 2024 PT. We will notify you at least 90 days prior to the beta program end date.
• Starting today, you can register interest for Atlassian Guard Premium. It is currently in limited availability, and we will start to gradually invite customers to get access to it every month
• When the beta program ends, you will need to purchase Atlassian Guard Premium to continue accessing Beacon beta functionality. If you do not purchase Atlassian Guard Premium within 14 days of the beta end date, Beacon beta will be removed from your account.

And…one last change! We’ve just launched the brand new Atlassian Guard community group. Please head over there and join to stay up to date on all things Atlassian Guard and connect with other security-conscious Atlassian customers like yourselves. We’ll continue to use this group until the Beacon beta program ends.

Thanks again for your ongoing support. I can’t wait to hear about how you all use these new security capabilities to empower your teams while safeguarding their mission-critical work! If you have any questions about this announcement, please feel free to leave them below.

Cheers,

Nick

[Huw Evans]

Will this be included in enterprise subscriptions? 

[Andy Gladstone]

Also interested in seeing how this naming scheme applies to the current product offerings for Jira and Confluence. Calling an add-on Premium or Standard almost indicates that they would be included in those existing structures, but based on the wording above and in the announcement it appears this will be an additional invoiced line item.