Is Atlassian Access Identity Manager required for SSO between Cloud and AD (or Azure)?

[Sean]

We use Microsoft Azure to provide authentication to many of our SaaS products in the cloud. Ideally this would be the way we have our staff authenticate to our cloud-based Jira apps like Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence. 

It appears that Atlassian Access is the recommended tool for doing this, but is it required? It does more than we need, so I'm guessing our CIO would rather not pay for an add-on unless it's really required. 

Our goal is to provide simple SSO to Atlassian cloud apps. We will have close to 100 licensed users, and around 15,000 employees who will be Service Desk customers. Is it possible for us to just use LDAP or do we actually need to go with Atlassian Access? 

[Rodrigo B_ · Accepted solution]

Hello Sean,

For our Cloud product, Atlassian Access is indeed required to use SAML for integrations with Identity Providers (ie: Microsoft Azure), more details can be found here:

• https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/atlassian-access

For Service Desk customers (portal-only users), there is no SAML feature available at this time, we have a feature request open to cover the specific needs (Like not being able to verify the domain of customers):

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-1015

*Still* there is a workaround to use the same SAML integration from your internal users to portal-only users, by migrating them to Atlassian account, before that, you would need to change your default application access so these users don't consume a default license, they won't have product licenses, so will not count towards the billing for Atlassian Access, more details on how to migrate users can be seen here:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/manage-jira-service-desk-customer-accounts-913213935.html

I hope the information below helps you!

Thank you & kind regards,

Rodrigo Becker
Atlassian Cloud Support

[Sean]

Thank you Rodrigo,

I have our system and cloud app administrators looking through the documentation. I also voted for JSDCLOUD-1015 and for the following feature request as well:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-6305

Sean