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You’re staring down a budget sheet, trying to justify every dollar spent on your tech stack. At the same time, your user base is growing, security threats are evolving, and you’re expected to do more with less.
It’s the classic IT paradox. Drive agility and innovation while simultaneously cutting costs and locking down security.
In a session at the recent JumpCloudLand virtual conference, Ashley Rouse, VP of Global Sales at JumpCloud, addressed this challenge head-on. The session, featuring Nathan Hug, IT Operations Manager at Harbinger Motors, showed us a successful example of how a lean IT team scaled effectively. Nathan shared how his team went from a blank slate to managing over 500 users in a high-growth EV startup environment, all with the help of JumpCloud’s unified platform.
If you want to hear the full story straight from Nathan, you can access the recorded session and the rest of the content library at JumpCloudLand. But for the IT admins in a hurry, here’s a look at some of their most impactful strategies.
The Challenge of Scaling from Zero to Hundreds
Harbinger Motors isn’t your average company. They’re an EV startup on a mission to electrify the medium-duty sector. When Nathan joined, the infrastructure at Harbinger was practically nonexistent. There was no mobile device management (MDM), and users were signing in with unmanaged credentials.
For any IT pro, this scenario is both a dream and a nightmare. It’s a dream because you have a blank slate to build things right. It’s a nightmare because you have to build everything at once, and you usually don’t have an enterprise-sized budget.
Nathan’s criteria for a solution were clear and relatable:
- Cost-effectiveness: As a startup, funding was top of mind.
- Holistic approach: They needed more than just an MDM or just an identity provider (IdP). They needed a unified solution.
- Automation: With a two-person IT team, manual tasks were the enemy.
They avoided becoming a traditional Microsoft shop, opting instead for a tool that could handle identity, device security, and access management in one place. That decision to prioritize consolidation early on paid huge dividends later.
Unlocking ROI Through Consolidation
One of the biggest takeaways from the session was how consolidation drives return on investment (ROI). We often think of ROI in terms of dollars saved on licensing, which is true, but Nathan highlighted something even more valuable. Time!
By unifying device and user management, Harbinger Motors eliminated the need for context switching. In a typical fragmented environment, you might have one console for MDM, another for single sign-on (SSO), and a spreadsheet for asset tracking. Nathan’s team manages it all in one pane of glass.
The unification of the tech stack means that when a user is offboarded, their access to devices, applications, and networks is revoked instantly across the board. There’s no need to log into five different portals to ensure a former employee is locked out. For a lean team, that efficiency is the difference between drowning in tickets and having time to work on strategic projects.
Automating the Device Lifecycle
If you’ve ever spent days imaging laptops, you’ll appreciate this part. Harbinger Motors moved from basic PowerShell scripts to a sophisticated, zero-touch deployment model for their Apple fleet.
Here’s what their workflow looks like:
- Procurement: A new MacBook is purchased and added to Apple Business Manager.
- Enrollment: The device automatically enrolls in JumpCloud MDM upon activation.
- Configuration: Before the user even connects to Wi-Fi, the device is already in the JumpCloud portal, receiving policies and configurations.
For Windows devices, they use a light-touch approach where the agent installs, sets the hostname, and runs automation commands to dial in the OS settings. This automation turned a time-consuming kitting process into a streamlined operation, allowing the team to support over 500 employees without inflating the IT headcount.
Frictionless Security with JumpCloud Go™
Security often comes at the expense of user experience, but Nathan’s experience with JumpCloud Go flips that script. He described it as the “unsung hero” of their stack.
Harbinger Motors prioritizes self-service to empower users and reduce help desk friction. JumpCloud Go allows users to authenticate into their web resources using the biometric authenticators they already have on their managed devices (like Touch ID or Windows Hello).
The workflow is seamless:
- Users sign in on Monday morning.
- As long as they are on a managed device, they don’t need to constantly re-authenticate for every app.
- JumpCloud Go handles the heavy lifting in the background, verifying the device’s trust status.
This reduces password fatigue for users and drastically cuts down on “I forgot my password” tickets for the IT team. It’s a perfect example of how modern identity management can actually make life easier for employees while strengthening security posture.
Future-Proofing with a Unified Roadmap
Toward the end of the session, Nathan made an interesting point about the value of a vendor’s roadmap. Because JumpCloud is a unified open directory platform, new features are constantly being added that integrate with the existing stack.
For Harbinger, being on the Prime package means they automatically get access to new capabilities like upcoming conditional access improvements or Linux features, without having to go out and buy a new tool. It allows them to grow into the platform rather than growing out of it.
The Real ROI of a Unified Platform
Listening to Nathan’s story, it was clear that the ROI Harbinger Motors unlocked wasn’t just about saving money on software licenses. It was about gaining the ability to scale the company from 100 to 500 employees with a tiny IT team—without sacrificing security or user experience.
By choosing a platform that unifies identity, device management, and access control, they built a foundation that’s agile enough for a startup but robust enough for an enterprise. For those of us on the front lines, that’s the ultimate goal. Building systems that work for us, not against us!
Ready to learn more about how to consolidate your stack and drive efficiency? Watch the full case study and explore other sessions at JumpCloudLand.
