Gerald Nakhle

Atlassian’s internal data platform is the backbone for analytics, product insights and business decisions across the company. Managing data access policies at this scale is complex. In this talk, we’ll share how Atlassian embeds robust data governance policies, balancing agility with compliance, and innovation with security. Learn how we handle access management, data classification, and policy enforcement across diverse teams and tools. A key part of our approach is leveraging Databricks Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) to manage and abstract complex business policies. ABAC enables us to flexibly enforce fine-grained access controls (FGAC) using data tagging along with tag-driven policies, adapting quickly to changing requirements while keeping implementation logic abstracted from users. Join us for insights into the challenges, lessons learned, and solutions that keep our data platform secure and well-governed.

Atlassian is rebuilding its central lakehouse from the ground up to deliver a more secure, flexible and scalable data environment. In this session, we’ll share how we leverage Unity Catalog for fine-grained governance and supplement it with Immuta for dynamic policy management, enabling row and column level security at scale. By shifting away from broad, monolithic access controls toward a modern, agile solution, we’re empowering teams to securely collaborate on sensitive data without sacrificing performance or usability. Join us for an inside look at our end-to-end policy architecture, from how data owners declare metadata and author policies to the seamless application of access rules across the platform. We’ll also discuss lessons learned on streamlining data governance, ensuring compliance, and improving user adoption. Whether you’re a data architect, engineer or leader, walk away with actionable strategies to simplify and strengthen your own governance and access practices.