Use Cases| Alpha Serve

We constantly improve our applications based on the feedback from customers, and share their use cases to understand better the problems which they help solving.

2FA: U2F & TOTP Security Plugin for Jira and Confluence

Otago University Use Case

This case study is aimed to show academic institutions what issues can be easily resolved with the help of 2FA plugins for Jira and Confluence. We hope it will be helpful and you'll learn how your educational enterprise can benefit from securing data with the offered solutions.

It is real story of 2FA evaluation and purchase told by the University of Otago. The customer wanted to make both workflow and project management more secure.
Some Background
  • The University of Otago uses JIRA, JIRA Service Desk, and Confluence for internal IT operations.

  • The customer doesn't keep deeply sensitive information in the above systems, however, they feel that the documentation they do keep should not be shared unknowingly.

  • Until recently they had a policy of keeping JIRA and Confluence as only accessible from on their campus local networks. VPN was OK too. They don't allow automatic sign-up or anonymous login to these systems either.
Security Issues Addressed by the Plugins
  • Recently though, the university had some use cases where they needed to allow access from the internet by both people and systems they wanted to integrate with. Primarily the remote users were supposed to be either their engineers or authorized contractors who would need to see the allocated tasks and work on them.

  • They wanted to add another layer of security to remote login attempts and not need proprietary devices or apps for their users. They didn't want to burden local users with an extra login step in their daily work, so the IP whitelist was requested. They also wanted to allow API calls from cloud-based services like OpsGenie or ServiceNow, so they couldn't be forced to 2FA either.
  • Customer's Atlassian instances are not connected to a central university SSO service covering multiple applications, so a specific solution for the Atlassian products was required.

  • Having these applications accessible from the internet also means they needed to increase their ability to audit login attempts.
Thanks to your team for the support we received during the evaluation period.
Being open to suggestions and the rapid responses were part of the reason we chose your plugins.
Damian Wheeler
Senior Database Administrator at The University of Otago
Outcome
  • Before the purchase, the customer downloaded the plugin for a free evaluation. We received their feedback on regular terms, which gave us a wonderful possibility to improve the product and cater to each and every need.

  • The entire period from the moment of the first download until the actual purchase lasted five months.

  • After precise evaluation and some improvements from our side University purchased our 2FA plugins both for Jira and Confluence
    Do you have your own experience with the plugin?
    Do you have further questions on functionality?

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    +38 098 03 77 286
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