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Riley Venable
Author

Riley Venable

VP of Services, Atlas Bench

Riley Venable is a full-stack engineer who has spent more than a decade inside Atlassian estates, from small businesses running one Jira instance to Fortune 500 companies running dozens, and he still writes the code. He leads services at Atlas Bench, and the work he is known for is the layer most people never see: identity and permissions, infrastructure, change control, and what breaks when AI is pointed at all three.

His range runs from application code to the metal underneath it. He has designed and led Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management migrations from Data Center to Cloud, built Forge and ScriptRunner apps used across roughly three thousand Atlassian Cloud sites, designed SSO, SAML, and SCIM integrations across Okta and Atlassian Guard, and built the cloud, networking, and device-management infrastructure that sits under all of it. He has been building with AI in production since before it was a product category, in environments where every agent needs an owner and every action needs an audit trail.

Riley is an Atlassian Certified Instructor and an Atlassian Community Champion, and he co-leads the Orlando Atlassian Community Events chapter. He writes about the parts of the platform people usually learn the hard way: permission inheritance, identity debt, cutover nights, and what an agent inherits when nobody decided what it should own.

Recent posts

October 2, 2026

Non-Human Identities in Atlassian Cloud: Service Accounts, Tokens, Apps, and Agents

How to govern non-human identities in Atlassian Cloud: service accounts, API tokens, Forge apps, and Rovo agents, each with an owner, scope, and expiry.

October 1, 2026

How to Choose an Atlassian Partner for a Jira Cloud Migration

How to choose an Atlassian Solution Partner for a Jira Cloud migration: what to verify, eight questions to ask, red flags, and a shortlist scorecard.

September 30, 2026

The Complete Guide to Agent Readiness in Atlassian Cloud

Agent readiness for Atlassian Cloud: the five checks to run before you switch on Rovo agents, from identities and permissions to the off switch.

September 28, 2026

How to Review Rovo Agent Access in Jira and Confluence

A step-by-step access review for Rovo agents in Jira and Confluence: who can create them, who can use them, what they can change, and what gets logged.

September 24, 2026

What Is Identity Debt in Atlassian Cloud Migration

Learn what identity debt means for Atlassian cloud migration and how to audit unowned accounts, stale permissions, and legacy access risks.

September 21, 2026

Rovo Agent Governance in Atlassian Cloud: 2026 Guide

Learn how to govern Rovo agents in Atlassian Cloud with identity controls, Guard policies, workflow guardrails, and audit trails for enterprise AI adoption

September 19, 2026

What Is Rovo Agent Governance in Atlassian Cloud

Learn how Rovo agent governance works in Atlassian Cloud, from permission models to admin controls, and configure AI agents securely.

April 16, 2026

New Work Types in Jira Business Spaces

Learn how Jira's new work type hierarchy in business spaces gives non-technical teams better structure, and control over their work.

April 16, 2026

Web Search in Rovo Agents: What It Is and How to Use It

See how web search in Rovo Agents works, how to set it up, and how teams are using it to bring live web context into their workflows.

March 31, 2026

Atlassian Guard Has a New Data Security Policy

Learn how Atlassian Guard's new unified data security policy simplifies enterprise-wide protection across Jira and Confluence.

February 25, 2026

Connect Third-Party Data Sources in Atlassian Analytics

Learn how to connect third-party data sources to Atlassian Analytics for richer, more complete business insights.

February 20, 2026

Best Practices for Writing Pull Requests on Bitbucket

Learn the best practices for writing better pull requests on Bitbucket Cloud and how its built-in features help teams and ship cleaner code.

All posts

Recent resources

guide

Do you need Jira Align? What Focus, Talent, Plans, and Product Discovery cover

Align (formerly Jira Align) is for large organizations that plan in program increments across many teams under a scaled framework. For most other organizations, Focus and Talent with Jira Plans, Jira Product Discovery, and Atlassian Analytics cover the jobs people buy Align for, and they are easier to implement because they work with the Jira you already have. They do not match Align feature for feature, so a formal increment cadence across many teams is still a reason to choose Align.

guide

How to approve and audit Rovo agents before launch

Give every Rovo agent a named owner and a second manager, limit who can create agents in Studio settings, and approve each one against a short record: purpose, identity (User's account or Agent's account), knowledge sources, the tools that write data, who can use it, a review date, and an off switch. After launch, audit it in Atlassian Administration with the audit log and Rovo trends, and run automated Jira agents on Agent's account so their changes are logged under the agent's name.

guide

Atlassian Strategy Collection explained: Focus, Talent, and where Align fits

The Atlassian Strategy Collection is three apps sold together: Focus for strategic planning, Talent for workforce planning, and Align (formerly Jira Align) for enterprise portfolio execution, with Jira Cloud Premium as the minimum. For most organizations, Focus and Talent, supported by Jira Plans, Jira Product Discovery, and Atlassian Analytics, connect priorities, people, and Jira work without restructuring Jira first.

Get an agent readiness assessment

Fixed scope. You get a findings report across identity, platform, and governance, an ownership gap analysis, and a sequenced plan for closing it.