Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

CISA calls phishing-resistant MFA the standard every organization should be working toward. For DoD components, federal agencies, defense contractors, and other organizations operating at NIST's highest authenticator assurance level (AAL3), that guidance narrows to two paths: FIDO2/WebAuthn, or PKI-based smart cards like CAC and PIV.

If you’ve managed Jira for a while, you've probably seen permissions grow more complex over time. You might have accounts that were granted temporary access during a migration but are still retaining it today. Or maybe contractors whose access was never revoked. You can clean that up. But with hundreds of users and projects, it’s going to take forever. Things become even more complicated when you're preparing for a SOC 2, ISO 27001, or SOX access review.

Teams are connecting Claude to Jira to summarize issues, draft tickets, and answer sprint questions in seconds. The productivity gains are real, but so is the security risk. The problem is simple: a direct connection gives Claude the same permissions as the person who set it up. If that user can view confidential projects or delete issues, so can Claude. There's no business logic in between deciding what AI should and shouldn't touch. Most organizations don't want to ban AI.

If you're evaluating multi-factor authentication for a bank, a hospital network, a defense contractor, or a government agency, you've probably already run into smart card authentication. It's the method behind the CAC (Common Access Card) and PIV (Personal Identity Verification) cards federal employees badge in with every day. It's also becoming the default authentication method that regulated industries reach for, once passwords and OTP codes stop being good enough.

Your ERP system doesn't know what a SAML assertion is. Neither does that 15-year-old internal tool running your warehouse floor. But your identity team just rolled out Microsoft Entra ID with conditional access, MFA, and zero trust policies everywhere. That gap is what modern authentication for legacy applications closes.

Every employee, contractor, and partner who touches your systems creates a paper trail of accounts, permissions, and access rights that has to be managed from the day they join to long after they leave. Identity lifecycle management is the process of creating, updating, and retiring a user's digital identity and access rights across that entire span — from onboarding through role changes to offboarding.

It starts like this: a new employee joins, and your IT team jumps in to create an account, assign access, and configure permissions. Soon after, tickets start pouring in for password resets, group changes, and locked accounts. By the end of the week, your admins are juggling hundreds of small but critical identity tasks. That’s the everyday reality for IT teams managing enterprise systems.

In 2026, cyberattacks are constant and highly coordinated. Every day, there are 300 million fraudulent sign-in attempts targeting cloud services. That number reflects the scale of automated attacks happening right now across the cloud. If your organization uses Atlassian Cloud apps like Jira, Confluence, or Jira Service Management, you rely on the cloud. Your critical data, like customer info, source code, sprint data, or documentation, is stored there.

Most organizations can point to firewalls, MFA policies, and an access control list and say access is secured. Far fewer can prove it. When an auditor asks who has access to a system, why that access was granted, who approved it, what the user actually did with it, and whether it was reviewed and removed once it was no longer needed, "we have an IAM system" isn't an answer — evidence is.

Are you trying to reduce Atlassian Cloud costs? Runaway software expenses are usually driven by three specific factors: dormant user licenses, slow manual provisioning, and paying for full access seats for temporary external collaborators. To optimize Atlassian Cloud costs, you need to address these root cost drivers directly rather than paying for seats nobody uses.