Introducing W&B Restricted Projects
Learn more about our newest governance and access management feature, Restricted Projects
Created on April 5|Last edited on April 5
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Identity and access management is the fulcrum for governance in any enterprise technical product, and even more so for an AI developer platform. Thus, it is a core mission at Weights & Biases to continuously evolve the authentication, authorization and auditing capabilities to be always ahead of the growing needs of our global customers.
That's why we're delighted to announce the launch of Restricted Projects, that allow a subset of team members to collaborate on AI workflows pertaining to confidential or sensitive data.
For context, an organization is the top-most entity in the Weights & Biases platform. Within the organization, admins can organize users into distinct teams to ensure an optimum balance of collaboration and separation. Users in each team can self-organize different AI projects, where each user is assigned a team-scoped role which is applicable across all projects in the team.
To provide more flexibility with the team-scoped roles, we recently released a Custom Roles capability to allow admins to compose new roles. Such roles can be fully managed and assigned using the SCIM API to weave into any automated admin workflows. To sustain that theme of simplified governance, with Restricted Projects we’ve added a new project visibility scope called restricted. When a user creates a project with that visibility scope, they can invite specific members from the team to collaborate with. Unlike other project scopes, all members of a team do not get implicit access to a restricted project.

A project owner or a team admin can also edit an existing project and set its visibility scope to restricted. During that action, they can invite specific users from the team, thus ensuring that all team members do not have implicit access to any sensitive data that may be used as an input or being produced as part of the project. Vice-versa, it is also possible to convert a restricted project into a team-scoped project. But such an action should be taken after due diligence, as all team members would then have implicit access to the relevant project.

Restricted visibility scope is applicable to team service accounts as well. By default, a team service account can be used in all projects within its parent team. That is useful when one is looking to centralize run & artifact logging into multiple projects within a team. But it can also pose a governance challenge in some cases. At those times, we’ve seen admins create separate teams to cordon off projects with sensitive data. If used at will, that can lead to a large number of hard to manage teams over time. But with the restricted visibility scope, admins can now ensure that different kinds of projects can be managed within existing teams, while ensuring that access is granted on the basis of need to know principle.
The new functionality is available as part of enterprise plans. If your organization uses a W&B server instance i.e. either Dedicated Cloud or a self-managed deployment, the new visibility scope is available with the latest server release. If you're already using Custom Roles in your instance, you can start using Restricted Projects now. Else, please reach out to your Weights & Biases team or to support@wandb.com to enable both the capabilities for your instance.
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