MiQ Digital is a programmatic media partner that builds bespoke programmatic advertising solutions designed to help marketers and agencies make the smartest decisions for every campaign. They are experts in data science, analytics, and programmatic trading. The company, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom and has 15 global offices across four continents, employs more than 1,100 people around the world.
Needing a rapid solution for patch management
When Apple released a patch for a serious zero-day exploit in September 2022, MiQ lacked an automated patching mechanism that would make it easy to shore up hundreds of Mac devices for its globally distributed team.
At the time, MiQ was using JumpCloud for device management. As the team began searching for a fast way to update all Mac machines, they realized that JumpCloud also had a patch management solution. So, they reached out to Leo Zandi, JumpCloud’s team lead of EMEA expansion, on WhatsApp for more details.
Though he was out of the office on holiday, Leo responded within minutes, and the JumpCloud and MiQ teams began rapidly working toward a solution.
Building a resilient tech stack in the AWS ecosystem
As they talked through their options, Leo suggested that it would be easier and more cost-effective for MiQ to procure JumpCloud through AWS Marketplace. Since the MiQ team was trying to take advantage of AWS’ Enterprise Discount Program — which provides discounts to organizations that spend a certain amount of money in the AWS Marketplace — this solution was a no-brainer for MiQ.
“It’s always amazing to help a customer save money,” Leo explains. “We obviously want to spoil our biggest customers, and MiQ is one of them, having been a customer for five years.”
Since procuring JumpCloud through the AWS Marketplace, MiQ hasn’t looked back. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways the company has benefitted from building its tech stack inside AWS.
1. Cost savings
After solving their patch management needs with JumpCloud, MiQ decided to further extend its commitment with the company by becoming a Platform Plus customer.
“Our experience during that incident made us more interested in JumpCloud,” says Akash Srivastava, Principal engineer at MiQ Digital India. By upgrading their subscription, “we were actually bumping up our contract significantly.”
By procuring JumpCloud through AWS, MiQ was able to offset those costs.
“Just from a very selfish cost-savings perspective, buying JumpCloud through AWS was a very strong motivator because it helps us pass the commitment required for the Enterprise Discount Program,” he continues.
Liking the smooth experience AWS Marketplace delivers, the MiQ team now tries to procure everything in its tech stack the same way.
“When we approach a new vendor, one of our key asks is: ‘Are you on AWS Marketplace?’”
2. Due diligence
When it comes to procuring technology, companies need to spend a lot of time researching their options and doing their due diligence. That being the case, it’s not uncommon for sales cycles to take several months — or even longer.
According to the MiQ team, the fact that a solution is available on AWS Marketplace gives them confidence that it’s a quality product — even in the event a vendor doesn’t have much of an industry presence — which makes their purchasing decisions easier.
“AWS would not onboard every single company that wanted to be a part of its marketplace,” says Chinna Babu T, Lead Cloud Engineer at MiQ. “They are a well-known player in the space, so if a vendor is on AWS Marketplace, we are confident that Amazon has already done a good amount of due diligence to bring them on.”
While MiQ had already been working with JumpCloud for several years and was very happy with the relationship, the fact that the platform was available through AWS was another added bonus that gave them peace of mind.
3. Simplified procurement
If you’ve ever purchased something on Amazon as a consumer, you know how easy it is to complete a transaction. AWS Marketplace delivers the same caliber of convenience to business buyers, providing smooth transactions over a familiar interface.
“Outside of a marketplace, procurement can get more complicated,” Akash says. “AWS makes it easy for us to subscribe to software. We don’t have to navigate multiple interfaces or deal with multiple vendors. Instead, AWS provides a centralized and simplified procurement process that makes life easier, and we can see all of our subscription and payment data in one place.”
4. Technical interoperability
Currently, JumpCloud maintains 90 days’ worth of user logs for audit trail purposes; customers can access that data via an in-product dashboard. Though the JumpCloud team is in the process of increasing the length of that activity history, MiQ wanted the ability to analyze 12 to 18 months’ worth of user activity data.
Thanks to AWS’ technical interoperability capabilities, the team was able to make that happen.
“Using the JumpCloud integration with AWS, we piped our data into an S3 bucket and built our own internal product on top of that stream,” Chinna explains. “Using JumpCloud’s API, we can extract data constantly into AWS and have created our own dashboard which gives us a yearly view of our user data for internal purposes and compliance reasons.”
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