Atlassian's Common Controls Framework

As with many companies, Atlassian has a number of international control standards that are applicable to our product development and our operations environments. We decided to evaluate the overlap between many of these independent standards, and ensure we have a single view of applying those standards to our internal environments.  The primary environment where we are applying these standards is to our cloud-hosting platform, we understand that we need to show that we are taking appropriate efforts to protect our customers and their data. However, not all of the standards are applicable to all environments.  For example, the focus for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is the systems that support our financial report, of which our cloud services are secondary at best. Let's take a look at the standards we evaluate and why.

Applicable International Standards

Below is a list of standards that we evaluated as we begun creating our internal common controls framework:

Common Controls Framework

As you can see from the table above, there are a series of different and disparate requirements, many of which are applied to the same environments, systems or teams. In order to make it a bit easier to understand the overlap and the similarities from many of these standards for our teams, we evaluated each of the control requirements and identified where there was overlap - where each of the standards was essentially evaluating the same domain. As a result, we have a common controls framework that easily maps to each of the standards.

Conceptual Model for Applicability

As we evaluated each of the requirements, we realized that it would be inefficient to apply the entire stack of controls to each of our products or online services. We have designed the structure so that different portions of the controls framework are applied to different parts of the delivery stack, which can be inherited by the other portions of the organization.