Varonis' industry-leading Data Security Platform now protects sensitive data in Atlassian Confluence. This expansion enables Confluence customers to secure their sensitive documentation, prevent data breaches, and comply with data regulations.
As one of the world’s most popular collaboration and knowledge management platforms, Confluence is a prime target for cyberattacks. Many organizations use Confluence as their single source of truth for product specifications, technical documentation, onboarding guides, and customer data. This critical business knowledge and intellectual property are at constant risk of breach and attack. Sensitive data and IP stored across Confluence pages, spaces, blog posts and attachments is also subject to regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
In this blog, we'll dive into how Varonis delivers automated security outcomes for Confluence customers.
Shining a light on sensitive data in Confluence
Confluence’s flexible permission model can lead to excessive access to sensitive information, creating blind spots for security teams. With cascading permissions, anonymous access links, guest users, and the sheer volume of content created and shared in Confluence environments, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of which pages contain sensitive data and who can access it.
For example, let’s say your product team creates a dedicated space for collaborating with an external design agency. When the design agency needs front-end technical specifications, an engineer copies the relevant page from an internal space into the external collaboration space. However, what the engineer doesn’t realize is that this page has child pages containing backend architecture details and database schemas. Since child pages in Confluence automatically inherit their parent pages’ permissions, the engineer has inadvertently granted access to your entire technical infrastructure documentation to a third party.
Varonis automatically identifies and classifies sensitive information across your entire Confluence workspace, providing visibility into where your most critical documentation resides and helping you understand your exposure risks.
Discover and classify sensitive data
To secure your sensitive data, you must first know where it resides, what it is, and whether it's at risk.
Varonis scans your entire Confluence environment in real time to discover sensitive data across all spaces, blog posts, and pages, including attachments and embedded content. You can easily identify concentrations of sensitive data like customer PII in support documentation, API keys in technical specs, or financials in quarterly planning pages, and prioritize your security efforts accordingly.
Additionally, Varonis offers a unified view of your data across your entire data estate. You can easily track how sensitive information flows between Confluence and other platforms like Jira, Slack, Google Workspace, and others.
Analyze risk and exposure
Data security doesn't end at discovery and classification. Varonis analyzes Confluence permissions and space configurations to prevent data exposure and breaches proactively. With a deep understanding of how content is shared and accessed, Varonis enables you to identify and address security risks before they become incidents.
Common risks Varonis identifies include:
- Sensitive documentation with anonymous access enabled
- Product roadmaps and specifications shared with external users
- Onboarding guides containing credentials or access information
- Customer data exposed in publicly accessible spaces
- Overly permissive space permissions that violate least-privilege principles
Proactively reduce risk and streamline compliance
Varonis makes it easy to understand and reduce data risk in Confluence. As your teams collaborate and share knowledge, Varonis continuously monitors for risky configurations and permission changes that could expose sensitive content.
For compliance teams, Varonis provides detailed visibility into where regulated data resides in Confluence and who has access to it, which is critical for demonstrating compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX.
Unified data security
Varonis offers a unified Data Security Platform for all your critical data. Our platform helps you easily monitor your sensitive data in Confluence alongside other SaaS, IaaS, and Database platforms, providing a holistic approach to data security across your whole data estate.
With Varonis, you get:
- Comprehensive coverage: Protect data across Confluence, Jira, Slack, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and more, all on a single platform.
- Unified risk view: See how sensitive data flows between Confluence and other systems
- Consistent policies: Apply the same classification and security policies across all your collaboration platforms
- Streamlined investigations: Track data access and sharing across platforms from a single interface
Ready to secure your most sensitive documentation? Get your free Confluence Data Risk Assessment today.
