Atlassian Crowd is a single sign-on (SSO) solution from Australian-headquartered software company Atlassian.
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Delinea Secret Server
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Secret Server (originally from Thycotic, now from Delinea since the 2021 Thycotic merger with Centrify) is an enterprise password management application, which is available with either a cloud-based or on-premise deployment which emphasizes fast deployment, scalability, and simplicity.
For companies that are already using other Atlassian systems, then Atlassian Crowd will fit in very well. This is especially the case if the company is not yet big enough to use LDAP for user management, Atlassian Crowd can act as a temporary solution until the company outgrows it, as it is much easier and simpler than LDAP.
I would recommend Delinea to any organization or colleague, as I have used it to support our shared services model, as well as a dedicated model for people support to customers, for privileged access management. Delinea has provided us with effective methods for handling unnecessary login attempts to the customer infrastructure. Additionally, the connection thread is available in the audit trail for review, which is a valuable feature to have.
Password Management: Its entire purpose, really. Secret Server stores passwords in an incredibly easy to use way. They can be organized in groups, they contain all the information about the site or system the password is used for (including URLs for websites), and even a notes field. You can set up specific policies for expirations and complexity, and Secret Server can even generate strong passwords for you. Using a password is simple, too, since you can just click a button to add it to your clipboard; you don't even have to unmask the password.
Security: The passwords are stored encrypted in a SQL database, and the application requires an authenticated login. This could be local, but we tie it into Active Directory. Each folder of passwords has groups assigned (in our case, again, AD, but you can make them local groups) with different permission levels, so we can compartmentalize passwords. Desktop technicians don't have access to network switch passwords, etc.
Easy Setup: It took me about an hour to get the server running, from spinning up the VM to importing our old password list. It took a little longer to organize the passwords into proper folders, and then assigning groups, but it was easy to do.
Personal Passwords: Each user also gets a personal folder, where they can keep their own, unshared passwords. This is nice for sites or systems with individualized logins (e.g., a firewall, VPN, etc.)
Favorites: Secret Server lets you tag passwords as "favorites" so you can easily find ones you use constantly. The search feature is nice, but this is nicer.
My rating is purely based on the configurational activities, as feature-wise delineation has all the features that are very beneficial for customers, though the implementation is a bit more manual work, which can be reduced with a low-code platform. Along with that, we can have a better UI to have intuitiveness and can manage the platform for shared customers in a better way. Overall, it is a very good tool for PAM.
Overall, support is good, you get quick responses from Atlassian's official support system, and documentation is decent enough for you to find what you need.
These products allow you to install them on your own infrastructure, so you can manage all aspects of them which can prevent you from getting throttled from API calls. When you hit a certain threshold of scale you may need to switch off of Atlassian Cloud to your own hardware. When you are a small startup, however, this product is probably a good starting point.
There were not very many solutions that provided the entire package of taking an account from creation and deactivating it when no longer needed, as well as providing the discovery of unknown service accounts. Other solutions like RoboForm and LastPass did not offer the ability to manage your service accounts and added layers of complication to ensure security.
New systems are tough when it comes to an ROI, as a dollar amount for saving time on a sign-in can be tough to track. Like most new systems that makes things slightly easier to execute as an end user or manage or support, it really might come down to the existing structure of how a company manages its users.
The positives are always with the end user, which I have to say, Crowd was able to accomplish.
