UPDATED 12:41 EDT / JUNE 05 2018

CLOUD

Atlassian releases Access to bring identity management and security to its cloud products

Australian enterprise software company Atlassian Corporation Plc. today announced the general availability of Atlassian Access, an identity administration and security product designed for the company’s cloud products.

In November, Atlassian announced the precursor to Access as an early access program that was introduced as Identity Manager. “When we introduced Identity Manager we were trying to solve centralized identity administration across our products,” Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian’s group product manager for Access, told SiliconANGLE.

Since then, the product took on a larger scope before today’s general release. The name Access emerged after early access for Identity Manager, Bharadwaj explained, because the scope of the product expanded. When it started, Identity Manager had a specific set of features, such as password management and identity control.

During early access, Atlassian expanded product’s capabilities to include role controls, sign-on management and other security elements. “We did not want customers to get the wrong idea about the product,” said Bharadwaj. With this in mind, the product received a rebranding as Atlassian Access.

Over the past seven months in early entry, Access also brought on board thousands of companies that adopted the product as an identity and security solution for managing Atlassian Cloud products.

With Access, companies get a number of controls and benefits that make managing identity, security and roles on cloud products much easier and centralized. For example, companies using Access can use Security Assertion Markup Language for single sign-on across the entire Atlassian Cloud, enable enforced two-step verification, manage password policies and receive priority support.

Access is designed to work across all users in an organization using Atlassian cloud products, not just on single products or sites. As a result, Access can provide a single point of management for all users for a company, even as those users traverse between different Atlassian products.

For example, for a company that uses Jira and Confluence – two team coordination products provided by Atlassian – each different team within a company could have its own enclave of users within own separate instances of Jira or Trello. That creates inefficiency when bringing employees on board and security problems when removing them.

“It’s not uncommon for our users to use multiple Atlassian products, but provisioning tends to be separate across products,” Bharadwaj said. “So many of our customers came to us and asked for a single client to manage all these products to be able to add users or remove users in one place.”

Using Access, the company would be able to create a single source of truth for every Atlassian account so that authentication and security would not need to synchronize between separate instances. Each account could travel across the entire product set with the user in question and keep roles and permissions without needing to be replicated.

That also means that anytime roles or permissions change for an account, they can be changed globally and there’s no chance that a role or access would be “missed” in an obscure or underused instance of the software.

Information technology administrators will also be given powerful tools to control user identity, roles and permissions using the SAML single sign-on. The capability provides access to a security language used for communicating authentication and authorization data between an identity provider, such as an account management service or internal identity management team, and the IT department.

Using Access and SAML, enterprise IT departments can hook up to Azure Active Directory from Microsoft Corp., Okta Inc., Onelogin Inc., Centrify Identity Platform and Bitium as supported identity providers. Atlassian also offers priority support with a subscription to Access with a team of around-the-clock agents offering one-hour response times for critical issues.

Research firm Zion Market Research reported in 2017 that the market for identity and access management is estimated to grow to $15.9 billion in 2022. Atlassian’s Access cloud product fits into this market, within which Zion identified security concerns and the need for compliance management as interest factors.

The identity management market is made up of a lot of segments, many of which are identity services that Atlassian Access can integrate with. Most enterprise companies will already subscribe to some sort of identity provider service, making such an integration potentially a necessity.

Because Access integrates with other Atlassian products, the subscription needs only be paid once per employee per month. This differs from other subscription services in that it does not cost extra based on how many Atlassian Cloud products it is integrated with. Access will connect to as many Atlassian products as a company subscribes to without any extra cost. Bharadwaj said she believes this will save Atlassian customers a lot of money over other types of pricing.

Currently, Access can connect to a large number of Atlassian Cloud products including Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Core, Confluence, Bitbucket, Stride and, in the coming months, Trello.

Image: Atlassian

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