Just like we should care about our online security, we also should make the best use of the tools that the modern gives us. That’s why, in this article, we focus on making Service Management a safe haven for your customers and data with customer permissions.
to build your protection steadily. Start from the most basic things like defining project roles, organizing users into groups and , specifying their roles within the service desk, creating permission and issue security schemes, and assigning them to each project.
Project roles
And so, the Jira and configure projects, customers raise requests, and agents from the can comment internally (visible only on the issue) or share their comments with customers. Moreover, we can assign more than one role to each user. Remember
User groups
There are :
jira-administrators,
jira-service-management-users,
jira-service-management-team.
If we have an internal customer portal, we can classify our users according to their position that grants them a specific authorization level. So, Jira Admins will go to the jira-administrators group because they need all the permissions that are necessary to do their job properly. And a customer support manager or even a team leader of each service desk team will be assigned to i.e. jira- service-desk-project-admins.
It’s worth to remember, though, that
Global permissions
The first thing to remember after creating user groups is to assign them the right permissions that apply to all projects on our instance. We can grant six permissions:
gives the assigned user groups access to all administration functions;
Jira Administrators is similar to the previous one, though limited. The assigned user group still can perform most of the actions included in the System Administrators import, export, some more advanced configurations, etc.;
Browse Users is kind of tricky because it enables to select users or groups, share the issues, as well as . So, be careful when granting this and remember to make it available to those with the right authorization level within the service desk;
Create Shared Objects enables us to share dashboards and filters with others.
Manage Group Filter Subscriptions;
Global permissions override the Permission schemes. Because of that, we should always grant adequate general permissions to user groups before defining actions they can perform within a project. And if we can’t give some permits to the users, it’s probably because they’re not assigned to the specific global permission.
We should pay close attention to what project permissions we give to the users, both internal and external, of our Customer Portal. For example, our clients shouldn’t have access to every part of the platform, especially to the Jira Administrator menu where they would be able to butcher the most important configurations. That’s why Jira Service Management has various permissions we can grant to the users depending on their role, user group they belong to or other variables.
schemes may differ depending on the needs of the project and what actions specific users need to be able to perform within it. Source: Tempo
As we can see from the graph, there are six that the user can get:
Project permits define actions a user can perform within the service desk project, i.e. if can administer a project, browse projects,
Issue permissions decide what users can do on the , for example, if they can assign issues or be assigned to them, close them, change the reporter,
Voters and Watchers allow to see the voters and watchers of the issue, as well as manage the latter;
Comments permissions enable users to add comments to an issue, delete them, edit, etc.;
Attachments permits include the most basic actions, such as adding attachments or delete them;
gives users the possibility to log their work, edit or delete it. This type of permissions is dedicated only to the service desk team, developers or administrators project role.
Remember that we can grant numerous permissions to each user group, project role or other variables available to select.
Project roles are useful for defining specific team members for each project. Referencing project roles (rather than users or groups) in your permissions can help you minimize the number of permission schemes in your system.
Issue security schemes
Another key point is to define authorization levels for viewing issues. To specify, issues are assigned specific security level which includes a group of users permitted to use them. from application access to . By creating these schemes, we restrict Browse Project permissions in a way. As Browse Project permits users to see all the issues within a service desk, we can limit their visibility by assigning appropriate security levels to them.
Customer permissions and Organizations
Basically, we can define who may become a customer of our Portal, as well as with whom they can share a request. We can set this up in Project Settings under Customer Permissions .
Also, we can add users to Organizations. Those users invited to Organization and not created in Jira Service Management won’t be added to the jira-service-management-customer project role. Also, Organizations enable customers to share their requests with other members of their organization. For example, those who are part of the corpoplanet organization will be able to share their requests from a service management project dedicated to their company with another employee included in it, however, only a specific number of its users will be assigned to a specific project role.
Whenever a new customer joins the service management, they get restricted access to the Customer Portal. As a part of an organization, these customers aren’t added to the Service Management Customers project role, but they can still raise requests in all projects their organization is assigned to.
safe from online security threats and boost the usability of Jira Service Management, we should also make sure that we have some more advanced permissions in place. Just to be sure, we should go more in-depth into the Service Management accessibility and define the visibility of its other parts to various user groups. In particular to such elements as:
Customer Portal – seeing as not all our users need to see some Customer Portals, we can limit their visibilities to only those who should have access to them.
request types – the same goes for the request types. For instance, the higher-ups in the company should be able to ask for a business car or more valuable hardware. This way, i.e. the interns won’t even see this request type when browsing the service desk;
fields – similarly to request types, some fields should be available only for those user groups that have the appropriate authorization to access them, i.e. only those who belong to corpoplanet-directors user group may share the requests with other users and view the request participants;
options – if we have a field in which the requester needs to define, i.e. the budget for a hotel room, we can make the most expensive option to choose available only for the directors;
SLAs –
f the service desk to the specific user groups, extending the security
is available in Extension for Jira Service Management app.
If we want to use
For example, we have a service desk project called Expeditions available for a few user groups, including corpoplanet-directors and corpoplanet-astronauts. Users from corpoplanet-directors will see only request types, such as , etc., while those from corpoplanet-astronauts will have access to a different set of request types, i.e. , etc. Both groups also will have some shared request types like . This way, we ensure that a specific user group can choose from the most relevant requests for them.
Safe and sound Customer Portal
Sometimes, simple safety measures as set permissions and limited visibility of some elements for specific user groups is a good start in cybersecurity. But, making sure that our Customer Portal and thus our customer’s data is safe and secure is a long-term goal. That’s why we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the basic service desk protection supported by good anti-malware software. Even adding such things as self-service or automation to our service desk may help secure it. Also, building a process that includes risk and incident management is a necessary precaution against online security threats.
If you’d like to learn more about , take a 30-day trial from the Atlassian Marketplace . Watch our tutorial or book a live demo via Calendly to see the app in action. You can also read more about how the app can help you:
Also published on the Atlassian Community.
