What to do when you discover an unauthorized site or product
Organization admins will sometimes find unauthorized Atlassian products or sites — collections of Atlassian cloud products — under their discovered products page. An unauthorized site or product is one that isn't managed by your Atlassian organization and doesn't appear under the products tab. We refer to these as shadow IT.
Below, we'll explore what to do when you think you've found a shadow IT site or product.
Contact the admins
The first thing an organization admin should do when they suspect they've uncovered shadow IT is to contact the admin(s) of the unauthorized site or product to find out additional usage details. Depending on the details of that conversation, the organization admin can then do one of the following:
- Decide to do nothing and allow users to continue using the site. In that case, the site will continue to show on the discovered products list and it will be managed separately.
- Transfer the site into their Atlassian organization to allow centralized administration and billing. Learn more about how to transfer products.
- Ask users to start using existing products to avoid duplicate costs.
- Delete the products or site, which will remove the product or site from the discovered products page, and cancel their subscription.
If you choose option 4, follow the steps below:
Remove the site and cancel the subscription
There are two methods for removing an unauthorized site or product and cancelling the subscription.
Method 1: Through the licensing portal
- Navigate to https://my.atlassian.com
- Find the Atlassian cloud item in the list.
- Click on cancel subscription.
- Choose cancel or delete immediately.
- Cancel allows access for the remainder of the billing period, then deactivates the site or product for two weeks (during which time the site or product can be reenabled), and finally deletes the site or product.
- Delete immediately does just that.
- Type cancel/delete now in the confirmation box.
- Provide Atlassian with a bit of feedback (this really does help).
- Click the cancel/delete now button.
- Refresh the portal and confirm the subscription is gone.
Method 2: Through the admin panel
- Navigate to https://admin.atlassian.com
- Select the site or product you want to cancel.
- Select manage subscriptions under the subscriptions & billing heading in the left column.
- Select cancel subscriptions at the bottom of the active subscriptions list.
- Choose cancel or delete immediately (the same results from method 1 apply).
- Type confirm in the confirmation box.
- Provide Atlassian with a bit of feedback (this really does help).
- Click the cancel/delete now button.
What if you don't have permission?
If the site or product isn't listed in My Atlassian.com or the admin panel, and your organization admins therefore don’t have permissions to delete it, you still have a few options:
- Ask the existing admin to delete the site or add you to the list of organization admins to allow you to proceed with the deletion.
- Contact support to get help to impersonate the other admin.
Cancelation vs. immediate deletion
Cancelling allows the site to linger for some time before it’s permanently deleted and is a good option if you want to be more cautious. But keep in mind cancelling still has consequences:
What happens to my data when I cancel my subscription?
Both deactivating and unsubscribing from a product will delete all of that product’s information immediately. Reactivating or resubscribing to the product will not restore its data. If a backup of the data was made prior to deactivation, you can import it back into the product.
If you’d like to request a permanent and immediate deletion, please contact support and explain your use case and request. Immediate hard deletion is anchored in a process lead by the customer advocates team to avoid irreversible mistakes. Here's how the process unfolds:
- The support representative will verify you are an authorized contact to perform the action. Authorized contacts include billing or technical contacts, organization admins, and site admins. Site admins must have been active within the past five days to be considered authorized.
- The support representative will request an additional acknowledgement explaining the action will be immediate and the result will be permanent.
- The request will be escalated internally and will be reviewed by a senior team member or team leader.
- Once approved, the site will be deactivated for at least one business day. If deactivation is requested on a Friday at noon, for example, the process for deletion will not begin until Monday at noon.
- The support representative will follow up with an additional email confirming you no longer have access to the site in question.
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