An update on product requests: bringing shadow IT controls to Trello and Bitbucket

[#1]

To meet the needs of our organization admins and enterprise customers, we launched product requests, a proactive shadow IT control for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management’s (JSM) Cloud Enterprise plans.

We are excited to share that we are expanding the power of product requests today!

Now, any organization admin with Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management’s (JSM) Enterprise will also have control over their Trello instances across all Trello plans. Customers with Bitbucket Premium will be able to beta test this functionality. In addition to expanded product coverage, we are happy to share an approval enhancement to the product requests workflow.

A multi-year journey: Atlassian’s approach to shadow IT controls

As you know all too well, uncontrolled shadow IT, defined as the use of IT-related hardware or software by an individual without the knowledge of the organization's admin or IT department, continues to be a challenge for enterprise customers. It can lead to decreased control of potentially sensitive data and an increased risk of data loss.

As a result, we have been on a multi-year journey to address your shadow IT concerns.

The history of addressing shadow IT at Atlassian:

Date	Description
July 2021	Launched automatic product discovery: an Atlassian Guard (formerly known as Access) feature that allows admins to see what shadow IT (user-created instances) existed in their organizations. Admins could not act on this in-product.
September 2023	Launched product requests: a Cloud Enterprise plan only feature to proactively control shadow IT across Jira, Confluence, and JSM. With this feature, admins could deny new requests for user-created instances and stop shadow IT from being created in the first place.
October 2023	Launched small improvement to automatic product discovery: added the reporting field ‘last active date’, therefore admins could see how recently the shadow IT instance was created/utilized.
February 2024	Launched significant improvement to automatic product discovery: added the ability for admins to join previously unmanaged instances in order to assume control of them.
We are here! October 2024	Launched expanded coverage and approval flow: Now, we are excited to announce the expansion of coverage to Trello and Bitbucket products. In addition, organization admins can approve product requests if they want to grant a user the ability to create a new instance under their management.

How to take advantage of product requests' enhancements:

Atlassian organization admins will be able to configure settings to either ‘allow new products’ or ‘require admin approval’ across their covered products.

If admins select ‘require admin approval,’ they will have a dashboard of requests from users to review, approve, or deny new instances.

---

Addressing your frequently asked questions

We know that product requests is a highly requested, highly adopted feature across our community. We’ve even learned that, the larger a cloud footprint, the more likely an admin is to frequently utilize this feature. We’re so happy to see its impact!

If you haven’t already begun using these controls, we hope these FAQs can help you get started.

FAQ	Answer
I want to get started! Can you help me understand the difference between the shadow IT controls available in Atlassian Guard Standard and the controls in Cloud Enterprise?	Because our Cloud Enterprise plan includes Atlassian Guard Standard, customers with Cloud Enterprise can utilize both automatic product discovery and product requests. Automatic product discovery, a feature within Atlassian Guard Standard, empowers customers to: See what user-created instances exist in their cloud footprint See how many users exist in that instance, its last active date, and who administers it Join as an admin to take over control Product requests, a feature within Cloud Enterprise, allows admins to set a proactive policy to either: Allow new instances to be created Require admin review before any new instance is created When requiring admin review, admins will then triage and accept or deny new instance creation.
I want to use product requests for Trello, how do I get access?	Customers with Trello must subscribe to an Enterprise plan for Jira, Confluence, or JSM to access the product requests feature. This means, for example, if you have Jira Enterprise and Trello Standard, you can use product requests for Jira and Trello. We are exploring options for bringing this as a standalone Trello capability in the future.
Why is product requests in the Cloud Enterprise plan (for Jira, Confluence, and JSM)?	The Cloud Enterprise plan solves the challenges of customers who manage many teams and data across their Atlassian toolchain. These customers operate at a complex scale, which can imply they have arduous workflows; the need to scale administrative practices to ensure no impact on security or performance; have high M&A activity; and more. In addition, these customers often operate in highly regulated industries and geographies or have stricter security and compliance requirements. Given this, we've made product requests - an advanced security feature - available in our Cloud Enterprise plan to help customers in large, complex environments more closely monitor shadow IT risks as they scale or manage compliance requirements.

Thank you for your engagement, and we look forward to seeing the impact product requests has on your organization.

Best, Vikki and the Admin Experience team

[Asher Francis]

Still absolutely disgusting that this is only available on the Enterprise plan. We pay in excess of $60k a year for Jira yet cannot control this unless we pay almost double that. 

[Bert Roos]

It is absolutely unbelievable that you take pride in resolving this issue for high-paying customers, while leaving others to struggle with Atlassian-facilitated shadow IT.

[tom_hawkins]

@Vikki Ulmer when will shadow IT controls be available to standard plan customers please? There are many functions where it's understandable why they are only available to Enterprise or Premium level customers, but this is NOT one of them! 

[S Alexandre Lemaire]

Agreed. Locking a feature meant to prevent costly misuse behind a more expensive plan is unacceptable. We need controls to stop users from unintentionally creating sub-Confluences and similar items that are automatically added to our bill (adding, that these rogue additions are not straightforward to cancel).

[Tomislav Tobijas]

While it's good to see improvements on this topic, I can just agree with what everyone else is saying and forward that all of our clients and partners are unhappy with not having the option to disable new product installs by their managed users. In my opinion, this feature should be available for all paid plans.

[Joe Johnson]

Joining everyone else here to say that giving this ability to Enterprise only plans is not acceptable. Many businesses with a larger footprint still use Premium, and it's unrealistic to suggest that they should upgrade their plan just for this basic security admin feature. Furthermore the option to block product creation is clearly already available in the admin panel for Premium users, we're justg not able to select it. Bad form.