Best way to create space that *cannot* be accessed by Administrators

[Julie King]

Our management team is looking at using Confluence to track meeting notes, action items etc.

We need this space to only be accessible to only to the senior management, which are just one subset of our Atlassian Administrators... so we cannot have some Administrators have any access to this space or associated JIRA project.

We know one option is to have a separate account and make new users there, but that seems like a waste of $ since the senior management already have Administrator accounts.

The problem is that other staff also have Administrator accounts and after many web searches I haven't seen anything that describes how to set this up for Confluence and/or Jira in a way where their access to the space would be blocked.

What is the best approach? Or do we need to look at creating a totally separate account - probably using Notion or a similar platform... as they at least still have the free accounts for limited users that was removed from the Atlassian offerings?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Julie King ,

indeed System admins will have access to all spaces/pages. You might find this documentation useful - confluence-admin-permission-levels-explained 

[Julie King]

Thanks Jack

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You have to trust your administrators.  A system admin always has access to everything.   They need to, because they can't be an administrator without that access.

Atlassian systems do have a useful model - admin rights only give you admin, not "can do everything", so you can not give admins the right to work wth anything in your systems.  But your admin can always administrate the system, meaning they could add themselves back into it.

So, two bits that jump out:

1. other staff also have Administrator accounts

Why?  Why have you got admins you don't trust?

2. You won't find Notion or other systems do anything more useful (Notion is actually worse at this - we see a lot of people moving to Confluence from Notion and mentioning that the access control is better).  You still need to trust your admins.  If you don't trust your Confluence admins, your best bet is, as you say, a second Confluence.

[Julie King]

Thanks for clarifying that there is no way to do what we want to do in our current Atlassian account.

This is a space where HR issues will be discussed - as well as strategy related things - and we will be making meeting minutes / action items / decisions related to both... and sometimes related to people who have Administrator roles. So it is not about trust, it is about confidentiality and having people who should see information be the ones who are able to see the information.

I remember seeing in 2020 from Atlassian on how different segments in the company could use Confluence the way I was describing, but I guess they assumed it would be in different accounts.

The reason I mentioned Notion is that our management group is small, so a lower cost account with senior management as the only users will serve our needs, while also completely isolating the information from other staff. Or maybe security in the cloud is not quite there yet for this type of cloud based "boardroom"? More research needed on my part, clearly.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>I remember seeing in 2020 from Atlassian on how different segments in the company could use Confluence the way I was describing, but I guess they assumed it would be in different accounts.

No, there was nothing like that.  Atlassian have always said that your admins could give themselves access to any area of Confluence (and Jira) that they wanted to.  It's nothing to do with accounts, if you want to prevent your confluence admins from being able to see a space, you have to put that space in a different confluence, one that they do not have admin rights to.

If your management group is small (up to 10 people), and needs a secured Confluence to work with, then maybe consider a free Cloud install?