Cloud Fortified is retiring. What the badges mean now
The programme many admins used as a shortcut is closing, and the badge is about to stop appearing on anything new. Here is what replaces it, what stays the same, and why the absence of a badge suddenly means something different than it did in August.
Short answer. Nothing you have installed breaks. Atlassian stopped accepting Cloud Fortified submissions on 1 September 2026 and retires the programme on 31 December 2026. A new programme, Atlassian Enterprise Certified, takes its place and adds privacy, accessibility and responsible AI to the old security, reliability and support criteria. The badge that still tells you a hard technical fact about your data, Runs on Atlassian, is unaffected.
The dates, in order
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 September 2026 | Cloud Fortified stops accepting new submissions. Annual reviews are no longer required for apps already in the programme. |
| End of September 2026 | Submissions open for Atlassian Enterprise Certified, the replacement programme. |
| 31 December 2026 | Cloud Fortified retires completely. |
Note what is not on that list: any date on which an app stops working, loses a feature, or needs migrating. This is a change to a certification programme, not to the platform. If you have a Cloud Fortified app installed today, the only thing that will eventually change is a small label on its Marketplace page.
What each badge actually claims
The badges answer different questions, and the difference matters more now that one of them is disappearing.
| Badge | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Runs on Atlassian | A technical fact about where your data lives. The app uses only Atlassian-hosted compute and storage, supports the same data residency as your Confluence, and any external egress such as analytics is under admin control. Atlassian detects eligibility automatically and applies the badge without the vendor applying for it. |
| Cloud Fortified (until 31 December 2026) | A claim about the vendor's operational practices: service level objectives, incident management, a support channel with a response commitment for critical issues, and participation in the bug bounty programme. It says nothing about where your data goes. |
| Atlassian Enterprise Certified (from late 2026) | The same territory as Cloud Fortified, widened. Atlassian describes the criteria as security, reliability, privacy, accessibility and responsible AI. In practice it asks the vendor for more evidence, not less. |
The useful mental split: Runs on Atlassian is about the software, Cloud Fortified and its successor are about the company behind it. An app can have one and not the other, and both combinations are common and legitimate.
Why the missing badge now means something else
This is the part worth taking to your next app review, because it quietly inverts a habit.
Until August 2026, a vendor who wanted the Cloud Fortified badge could apply for it. If an established app did not have it, that was mildly informative: either the vendor had not bothered, or had not passed. Plenty of teams used it as a first filter and moved on.
Since 1 September that reasoning no longer holds. Submissions are closed. An app published in September, October or November cannot carry the badge no matter how well built it is, how carefully the vendor runs support, or how much they would like to be certified. And the replacement programme has barely opened its doors, so nothing has the new badge yet either.
For a few months, the badge on a Marketplace page mostly tells you when the app was published. Filtering by it during this window quietly filters out everything new, which is the opposite of what most people intend.
What a badge never covered anyway
Both the old programme and the new one are worth having. Neither answers the four questions that actually decide whether you regret an installation a year later.
- Is anyone still home. Look at the date of the latest version and whether the vendor replies to reviews. A silent vendor with a shiny badge is still a silent vendor.
- What happens when you uninstall. If the app only rendered content that already lived in Confluence, removing it leaves your pages intact. If it kept data in its own storage, ask what you get back and in what format, before you install rather than after.
- What the bill looks like at your next size. Marketplace pricing steps up by user tiers. Price the team you will have next year.
- Whether it is still on Connect. Connect apps cannot be updated after March 2026, so a Connect app without a stated migration plan is running on a clock regardless of any badge.
We wrote those out as a longer checklist in what to check before installing a Confluence app, and the Connect deadline in Connect app end of life.
The arithmetic of checking by hand
Reviewing one app properly takes roughly twenty minutes: read the Marketplace page, open the privacy policy, check the version history, read the last dozen reviews and the vendor's answers, then price it at your next headcount. A shortlist of six apps is two hours of somebody's afternoon.
That is exactly the work the badges were meant to compress, and for the next few months they compress less of it than they used to. The practical answer is not to check more, but to check the right two things: where the data goes, which Runs on Atlassian still answers instantly, and whether the vendor is alive, which takes about ninety seconds on the reviews tab.
What to do between now and January
If you are choosing an app in the next few months, drop Cloud Fortified from your filter list and use Runs on Atlassian plus the four questions above. If you already run Cloud Fortified apps, do nothing: they keep working, and the vendors most likely to pursue the new certification are the same ones who pursued the old one. If you are being asked by procurement for a certification that does not exist yet, the honest answer is that the programme opens at the end of September and nobody has the badge yet.
If your case is simple, the built-in Confluence features and free apps are the right answer, and no badge changes that either.
Disclosure: I build Confluence apps. Our four apps carry Runs on Atlassian, because they are Forge apps that keep everything inside your own site: Clickable SVG, Smart Search, Table Export and Word Import. They do not carry Cloud Fortified, and after 1 September they never can, which is the whole point of this article. Each product page has a demo you can try in the browser without installing anything.
Questions people ask
Is Cloud Fortified going away?
Yes. Submissions closed on 1 September 2026 and the programme retires on 31 December 2026. Annual reviews are no longer required for apps already in it. Installed apps keep working; only the programme ends.
What is Atlassian Enterprise Certified?
The replacement. Atlassian describes it as recognising apps that meet enterprise standards for security, reliability, privacy, accessibility and responsible AI. It covers the old ground and adds privacy, accessibility and AI practices. Submissions were expected to open at the end of September 2026.
Should I avoid an app with no Cloud Fortified badge?
Not on that basis, and especially not now. Since submissions closed, no newly published app could have earned it. The absence of the badge tells you when the app was published, not how good it is.
Does Runs on Atlassian change too?
No. It is a separate badge about where your data lives, applied automatically by Atlassian to eligible apps, and it is unaffected by any of this.
Do I need to do anything to my existing apps?
No. There is no migration, no reinstallation and no deadline for customers. The only date customers should have in a calendar is the Connect one in March 2026, and that is a different subject.