The Challenge: Rapidly Transitioning to Remote Work
One of New Zealand’s largest environmental nonprofits, which is part of a larger global parent organization, was forced to rapidly transition to remote work as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in early 2020.
As the nonprofit began its work from home initiative, they quickly found out that Active Directory — which runs on a Windows server hosted in their office, on-premises — wasn’t doing a lot of what its users needed in a remote environment.
Seeking a better way forward, the nonprofit decided to move its 60 users to a cloud directory that would enable them to stay productive while working from home.
The Solution: JumpCloud’s Cloud Directory
Being part of a global network of nonprofit organizations has its perks. As the New Zealand nonprofit chapter was searching for a solution, an IT administrator reached out to a colleague in Australia to find out what they were doing to solve the same problem.
“At the time, we were looking to remove all dependencies of our Active Directory,” the IT admin said. “Another colleague was already using JumpCloud and he recommended it to me.”
After learning that JumpCloud could do everything the IT team was looking for — including managing all devices and environments from one location — the nonprofit decided to implement JumpCloud as its cloud directory solution.
The Results: Streamlined Onboarding, Happier Employees, and Smooth Integrations
After the nonprofit implemented JumpCloud, saw the simplicity of integrations, endpoint management, and new user onboarding, it quickly became apparent that they made the right decision.
JumpCloud was the perfect tool.
IT Admin at the organization
Here are some of the benefits the nonprofit has already enjoyed by deciding to use JumpCloud.
1. Easy implementation
Thanks to JumpCloud’s AD Migration Utility, getting up and running on the platform has been a cinch. After installing the tool, the nonprofit simply has to create a user login for each employee, and that username then populates across all applications.
It’s been a really good experience, it’s really easy to implement, and it’s working really well, too. The migration tool is great — it’s really intuitive for Windows.
IT Admin at the organization
The nonprofit was also able to apply the same policies they were applying through Active Directory via JumpCloud, which was another criterion they considered as they narrowed down their choices for a cloud directory.
2. Happier users
As anyone who’s done it can attest, logging in and out of platforms all day long isn’t the most exciting or productive experience. Instead, it can be quite frustrating. After deploying JumpCloud, the nonprofit immediately noticed that employees were thrilled by the simpler approach to identity and access management.
“Users are loving it,” the admin said. “They only have one password.” Further, that’s the same password they use for Okta, which the nonprofit uses for single sign-on and as a single source of truth.
3. Accelerated new user onboarding
JumpCloud has also simplified the nonprofit’s new user onboarding process.
We’re trying to aim for zero-touch onboarding. We’re not there quite yet, but JumpCloud has been very helpful on this front. We just set up the computer, create a user, and send the laptop to the new hire, wherever that individual is.
IT Admin at the organization
Once the user receives the laptop, the nonprofit gives that person their password. They log in, change their password, and that’s that.
“From there, we can just manage the laptop,” the admin continued.
4. Streamlined endpoint management
The nonprofit primarily relies on Windows and Mac devices, but they do use Linux a bit, too. When they were using Active Directory, they always had a problem managing Mac machines.
“It was always breaking,” the IT admin explained. “We had to implement a separate platform just to manage the Mac devices.”
Thanks to JumpCloud, the nonprofit can manage all devices from one place. On top of that, using JumpCloud, it’s possible to add and remove admin access for users in one click — which is particularly helpful in a fully remote environment.
“We can tell the user, ‘You have admin access now. Install what you have to install.’ And once that’s done, we remove the admin access.”
The nonprofit also uses JumpCloud’s grouping feature to group users and devices by department, system access, and more.
When we add a new device, we can deploy all the software that the device will need based on the user’s role. Before JumpCloud, we were using another platform to deploy software. Now, we have everything in JumpCloud — device management, policy management, and software management.
IT Admin at the organization
5. Okta integration
As its single source of truth, the nonprofit needed to integrate JumpCloud with Okta for everything to work according to plan. Using the JumpCloud utility tool, integration was seamless.
“It worked right away — pretty much in real time,” the IT admin said. “When we assign a JumpCloud application to a user, Okta sends information including the username and password to JumpCloud, and then JumpCloud sends that information to the device once it’s assigned to a user.”
Looking to the Future
“I’ve been sharing the JumpCloud solution with other IT members around the world,” the IT admin said. “Some are quite into this and will probably replace their Active Directory that they host locally.”
A final comment that the IT admin wanted to add:
“I really appreciate that JumpCloud gave us a good discount for being a nonprofit organization.”
Check out another nonprofit organization’s JumpCloud story.
Learn More About JumpCloud
To learn more about how your nonprofit can use JumpCloud to better manage cross-OS endpoints, improve onboarding, secure remote users, and much more, get started with JumpCloud today.