JIRA manages its permissions in a hierarchical manner. Each level is more fine-grained than the one above it. For a user to gain access to a resource, for example, to view an issue, they need to satisfy all four levels of permission (if they are all set on the issue in question):
Application access: This defines the groups that will have access to the various applications in JIRA, for example, JIRA Software
JIRA global permission: This permission controls the access rights functions such as overall administration
Project-level permission: This permission controls the project-level permissions
Issue-level security: This permission controls the view access on a per-issue level
We will now look at each of the permission levels and how you can configure them to suit your requirements, starting from the most coarse-grained permission level—global permissions.