Seaco is one of the largest shipping container lessors in the world. Originally founded as “Sea Containers” in 1965, Seaco is a globally recognized brand that offers one of the largest and diversified modern fleet of 2.4 million TEU intermodal container equipment. Seaco provides a range of flexible leasing solutions, sales, and support services to more than 750 clients across the world, operating from an international network of 23 sales and support offices, further supported by an independent depot network across 189 port locations in 51 countries, helping to position container equipment, when and where it is needed.
Managing a complex IT environment for a global team
As a company that manages shipping containers that are constantly moving around the world and bills customers by the day, Seaco’s operations are highly complex. The company interfaces with 500+ container ports and depots worldwide via EDI and API, and reams of data flow back and forth from the ports to company headquarters.
JumpCloud allowed us to not only collapse a few of the products that we were using into a single interface, it also meant that we were able to manage the policies of end-user devices irrespective of whether it was a Mac or a PC.
Damian Leach
“Data is absolutely paramount — it runs our business,” says Damian Leach, chief information officer at Seaco. “Security is a really big thing for us; we’ve evolved our environment; we’re looking at new ways of managing the IT assets we have — not only the ones we distribute across the employee base but also those that serve our transactional platform.”
According to Leach, Seaco’s environment is nearly 100% cloud-based, and the company plans to move entirely into the cloud by the first quarter of 2025.
“Our company uses a mix of Macs and Windows laptops, and we also issue mobile devices to our staff, who work in different time zones across the globe,” Leach continues. “This can be a challenge from an end-user support standpoint.”
Leach joined Seaco in October 2023; once he came on board, the company started giving employees the option of using Macs.
“We wanted to provide an alternative solution to all staff, lightweight, robust, high-performance machines with a long battery life as a lot of our staff are on the road a lot. This is where the Macbook Air came in. As a result of that, we needed to review the way that we were securing and managing our new and existing devices,” he says. “At the time, our device management solution wasn’t covering mobile devices, and we weren’t able to support Macs. We had kind of a disparate approach to endpoint management, and we wanted to create a consistent approach and also have remote access control due to the distributed nature of our company.”
Choosing JumpCloud to consolidate IT tooling
When the IT team also began looking for a mobile device management solution, they considered Microsoft Intune and MobileIron.
“We felt that rather than having two or three different tools for remote management policy, remote access, and device management we wanted to consolidate the management of the devices in a single interface,” Leach says.
Since Leach was already familiar with JumpCloud from a previous role, he wanted his team to explore using the platform to replace existing device management, remote management, and authentication tools.
“We ran a pilot, and JumpCloud performed really well; it came out on top,” Leach says. “JumpCloud allowed us to not only collapse a few of the products that we were using into a single interface, it also meant that we were able to manage the policies of end-user devices irrespective of whether it was a Mac or a PC.”
At the same time, JumpCloud enabled Seaco’s End User Services IT team to manage mobile devices from the same screen.
“We’re a data-driven organization, data is paramount, and protecting those mobile devices was core to our ambition,” Leach continues.
JumpCloud gave us a consistent, single-pane-of-glass view to actively manage the environment that we had as well as the net-new environment that we were delivering as part of the end-user transformation strategy we introduced.
Damian Leach
Since the bulk of the IT team is based in Singapore, they need tools that support the remote nature of Seaco’s operations.
“JumpCloud fits into that very well, too,” Leach explains. “Because of the distributed nature of our offices, it was normally quite a challenge to manage our users’ devices remotely.”
Future-proofing IT management & operations
With JumpCloud, employees now have the option to choose which devices they want to use since the IT team can manage all types of devices with ease.
“We applied a remote lock policy as well as a remote delete policy on all devices to protect the organization’s data,” Leach says. “That was absolutely key for me — a part that was missing from the mobility approach we had previously.”
Leach and his team were also impressed by JumpCloud’s feature-rich nature and robust R&D roadmap.
“One thing that we looked at was what our current needs are versus what we might need in the future,” Leach explains. “It’s clear that JumpCloud is spending a decent amount of money on R&D and therefore keeping up with the trends such as passwordless authentication and zero-trust support. On top of the basic functionality, we made sure we were future-proof; it’s great to know these features are there in case we mature our posture to that point. I just don’t see the competing products putting enough thought into their R&D roadmap.”
While Seaco’s currently 100% based in AWS, the team is evaluating the advantages of adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Thanks to JumpCloud, they know they can seamlessly move some assets to Google Cloud Platform if they so choose, Leach says.
Strengthened cybersecurity
With JumpCloud in place, Leach and his team are now looking to consolidate cybersecurity tooling and implement a zero-trust strategy.
“It will put fences around our core assets,” Leach says. “We’re also looking at things like geofencing and getting the necessary telemetry from devices that we need to try to protect against any kind of threats that may or may not happen across our environment. JumpCloud forms a big part of our holistic security strategy across our cyber defense posture.”
Compliance simplified
Due to the critical space it operates in, Seaco gets audited every year.
“From an IT standpoint, we’re looking to roll out segregation of duty policies across core assets and infrastructure,” Leach continues. “JumpCloud forms a big part of that strategy as well; we’re able to provide logs as well as lockdown asset controls beyond what we used to be able to do.”
Currently, the team is in the process of implementing JumpCloud authentication through single sign-on (SSO) to its transaction platforms.
“That’s going to help us achieve ISO 27001 accreditation, which we’re in the process of going through,” Leach says, adding that they’re also exploring multi-factor authentication (MFA) via JumpCloud.
Ease of implementation
When it comes to rolling out any new technologies, headaches are the last thing IT teams want; JumpCloud didn’t cause any.
“To be honest, it’s been incredibly easy to roll out,” Leach says. “The team has had very, very good feedback in terms of ease of use and ease of rollout for the platform to support our authentication needs across our core applications.”
Enabling advanced AI use cases
As a data-driven organization, Seaco is currently in the process of building a brand-new data lakehouse to power its AI use cases.
“Things like oil prices, steel prices, market data on where the ships are and where they’re likely to port — feeding all that information into the big data lakehouse and then running AI analysis to try and predict the patterns is super exciting,” Leach says.
“Supply chain analytics is absolutely critical for us, and the future of analytics is looking at those external data feeds to make more predictive decisions,” he continues.
It’s really about creating a global AI-enabled data platform that facilitates the necessary data-driven insights for our business to make the right decisions, and JumpCloud helps us get there.
Damian Leach
Using policies to protect devices
Leach and his team also use JumpCloud to push updates and policies out to all devices. In particular, the team was concerned with being able to manage the Apple fleet remotely, but “it was made super simple by JumpCloud.”
“It’s actually incredibly easy to do,” Leach explains. “The team was really impressed with the ease of pushing out the policies to Mac devices and the central interface we have through JumpCloud to do that.”
In JumpCloud, Leach has found a tool that makes life easier.
“I love the fact that people are thinking about solving traditional IT challenges with better technology,” Leach says. “I’m always looking to support businesses that really share my vision for a better IT landscape, and JumpCloud really meets that ethos. You’re solving the problems that IT leaders have in a different way and also ensuring that you maintain a nimble, flexible approach to development.”
Any last words?
“JumpCloud enables me to simplify my IT landscape, collapse a few products into one, and create a better experience and simpler workflows for my IT staff as they support the assets of the organization globally,” Leach concludes. “Because we’re distributed, we need good tools, and resilience and reliability are incredibly important for us. I’m pleased to say that JumpCloud delivers on that front.”
About JumpCloud
JumpCloud® delivers a unified open directory platform that makes it easy to securely manage identities, devices, and access across your organization. With JumpCloud, IT teams and MSPs enable users to work securely from anywhere and manage their Windows, Apple, Linux, and Android devices from a single platform.
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