Built Technologies is a fast-growing fintech company with stringent compliance requirements, a remote workforce, and 200 employees.
Stephen Malone, Built’s IT Operations Specialist, ushered the company through a transition to remote work and keeps the workforce secure with a two-person IT team.
- Organization: Built Technologies
- Location: Nashville, Tennessee
- Problem: Remote identity, access, and device management
- Goal: Secure and compliant remote workforce
Background
“JumpCloud is the foundation of our whole operation and, from a technology standpoint, the source of truth.”
Built migrated to the JumpCloud Directory Platform after trying to manage identity and access through Google Workspace and a patchwork of point solutions. With JumpCloud they eliminated the complexity and inefficiencies of multiple tools and have a single, comprehensive cloud platform for secure identity, access, and device management.
Challenges: Scaling Amid Remote Work
The company has more than doubled in size since Malone joined in early 2020 — from 80 to 200 — and they add dozens of employees each month. With a two-person IT team it’s a challenge to remotely onboard new employees with secure access to dozens of IT tools to get work done. As much as possible, he looks to reduce remote access and password ticket issues that can quickly swamp his lean team.
“We are so spread out and so ingrained in different functions of the company that if we were spending 100 percent of our time resetting passwords and manually managing individual user access, we would never be able to do that,” Malone said. “A lot of things wouldn’t get done, or we’d have to pay extra money to contract someone else to do it.”
The team also needed to rapidly shift to remote work when their office shut down in 2020 amid the pandemic.
Solution: Onboarding in Minutes
With JumpCloud in place, Malone’s team can streamline user onboarding, ease remote access challenges, and reduce costs.
They use the JumpCloud platform to provision users to:
- Mac and Windows devices
- AWS infrastructure
- Google Workspace, the Atlassian suite, and other SSO applications
- An LDAP VPN for access to their backend environment, plus a RADIUS VPN for access to the local network
In all, they provision new users to more than 60 products — a process that’s simple through JumpCloud’s standards-based protocol-driven approach, including SAML/SCIM, cloud LDAP, and cloud RADIUS.
“If we weren’t using JumpCloud the way we are — and we had to manually create a user and identity for each one of those products — we’d need to have someone fully dedicated to onboarding and offboarding,” Malone said.
“Whereas, I got six onboarding requests today, and I did them all in 10 minutes.”
The reverse process makes it easy to disable user access during offboarding. Malone’s team simply removes users from their user groups, which suspends their overall access — even if their accounts haven’t been deleted yet.
“Luckily, the way that JumpCloud works, if we disconnect users from their user groups — even if they haven’t been removed from that device yet — they still can’t get in,” Malone said.
Solution: Remote Work
With JumpCloud’s agent installed on Built’s Mac and Windows user machines, Malone’s team can manage the user identity on each device, as well as enable self-service functionality. This capability for remote management saves Malone’s small IT team time, and keeps employees productive. Malone has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, including from onboarding engineers, about how easy it is to use JumpCloud and how transformative it is to have all their tools in an easy-to-access console.
With so many users and applications in play, JumpCloud’s password manager capabilities are a big benefit for the company. Users have one password instead of 60 to access their resources, including their Mac and Windows devices, and they have one-click access to their applications from a centralized User Portal. Plus, instead of clicking through an email or a web browser form, they can change their passwords directly on their devices. This approach is both more secure and more user-friendly.
“The fact that the process for managing and changing passwords is so intuitive, and there’s so much self-service functionality for end users with JumpCloud, means that our IT team doesn’t have to spend much time on it,” Malone said.
Users have one set of secure credentials they use to access virtually all their resources, including their devices and SaaS applications.
“Whenever I onboard new people, I tell them we use a system called JumpCloud, and explain that JumpCloud is the source of truth for everything at Built. If you know your JumpCloud credentials, you can get into anything.”
His team also rolled out security configurations to lock down user devices, such as full disk encryption and disabling external storage devices, and requires multi-factor authentication (MFA) when users log into their JumpCloud User Portal, through which they access their SSO applications.
“We work in fintech, so client privacy and security is our North Star. That’s another value-add for JumpCloud: It’s intuitive to use, but it’s also very secure. It helps us maintain peace of mind — for us and for our clients.”
The Result
With JumpCloud, Malone has a single, secure cloud directory platform that simplifies and centralizes secure identity and access management. The ability to manage user identities and access — no matter where they’re located saves his team time and frustration. End users are happier and more productive with one set of secure credentials that gives them access to all their resources. Malone was able to do this all with the existing IT team, extending their capabilities with efficient workflows rather than increasing the size of their team.
“There’s a ton of functionality that we get from JumpCloud that we wouldn’t get anywhere else,” Malone said. “No other solution is as comprehensive as JumpCloud, especially in a Mac and Windows environment.”
Learn More
JumpCloud is a complete cloud directory platform to manage devices, user identities, and resource access — Mac, Windows, and Linux — no matter where they’re located. Whether your users are in the office or remote, JumpCloud gives you the tools you need to secure them and their devices from a web-based console.
Get started with JumpCloud today.