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In IT, there is a dangerous gap between “working” and “working well.”
If you ask someone in IT if their productivity suite works, they will likely say yes. Emails are flowing, files are sharing, and meetings are happening. But if you ask them how hard it is to keep it working—to manage identities across devices, secure endpoints, and enforce compliance—the answer changes.
A system that requires constant manual syncing, custom scripts, and third-party connectors isn’t truly working. It’s accumulating technical debt.
According to a recent survey of U.S. IT decision-makers, nearly one in three organizations report their suite “works” only with significant cost or effort. Furthermore, only 6% of IT decision-makers report a truly seamless experience with their current setup.
These numbers reveal a hard truth: fragmentation is the silent killer of IT efficiency. While we often treat productivity suites as the backbone of operations, for many, they have become a source of friction.
It is time to stop patching the gaps and start demanding unification.
The High Cost of “Good Enough”
Most IT environments today are a patchwork. You might have Google Workspace for collaboration, but you’re still tethered to Active Directory for identity, creating a split-brain scenario. Or perhaps you’re using Microsoft 365 but struggling to manage a growing fleet of Mac and Linux devices, forcing you to bolt on third-party MDM tools.
This is the “DIY Unification” trap. IT teams attempt to glue disparate systems together to create a semblance of a single stack. But this approach has consequences.
The Accumulation of Technical Debt
Every connector, add-on, and manual sync you implement solves an immediate problem but creates long-term liability.
- Maintenance Overhead: Integrations break. APIs change. When you rely on a web of 9.3 tools (the average number IT teams use to manage core functions), you spend more time maintaining the connections than optimizing the environment.
- Licensing Sprawl: Each additional tool comes with its own contract and cost. 36% of IT teams cite complexity in managing multiple device types as a top challenge, often leading to the purchase of niche solutions that inflate the budget.
- Security Gaps: Complexity is the enemy of security. When identity and device management live in different consoles, policy drift is inevitable. A user might be offboarded in HR, but their device access lingers because the systems didn’t sync instantly.
The Innovation Tax
When your team is buried in the operational overhead of keeping fragmented systems running, strategic initiatives take a backseat. You cannot focus on Zero Trust implementation or AI adoption when you are busy troubleshooting a broken connector between your IdP and your MDM.
Why We Accept Fragmentation (And Why We Shouldn’t)
Historically, fragmentation was the only option. No single vendor did everything well. You bought the best email suite, the best directory service, and the best device manager, and you made them talk to each other.
But the market has shifted. The rise of platform-native unification means we no longer have to choose between “best of breed” and “integrated.”
Consider the sheer scale of device management needs. The global Mobile Device Management (MDM) market is projected to reach approximately $15.75 billion by 2025, driven largely by the complexity of remote and hybrid workforces. As BYOD and diverse OS environments become the standard, the old method of forcing non-Windows devices into a Windows-centric management scheme is no longer viable.
The Path to True Unification
True unification isn’t about buying a suite that claims to do everything but forces you into a walled garden. It is about an open, cloud-native architecture where identity, device, and policy operate as a single, coordinated system.
This is the logic behind the collaboration between Google Workspace and JumpCloud. By combining Google’s collaboration and AI capabilities with JumpCloud’s open directory and cross-platform device management, organizations can achieve a single control plane.
When you unify identity and device management, you gain:
- Zero Trust Reality: Access is granted based on user identity and device posture, not just a password.
- Operational Velocity: Onboarding happens in minutes, not days, because identity provisioning and device configuration are automated in one flow.
- Audit Readiness: Compliance isn’t a scramble to correlate logs from five different systems. It’s a single report.
Stop Patching, Start Solving
It is tempting to keep the lights on with another workaround. It feels safer to maintain the status quo than to rip out the patchwork. But the cost of inaction is rising.
If your productivity suite requires significant effort to manage, it is not an asset; it is a drain. The future of IT belongs to those who simplify. It belongs to admins who refuse to accept that “working” is good enough and demand an environment that is secure, scalable, and truly unified.
Don’t let fragmentation dictate your security posture. Download a copy of The Enterprise Unification Gap to get more insights from IT leaders about how their productivity suites are “working” and what they feel they can do to make it truly sing.
The Enterprise Unification Gap
Find out why 87% of IT Leaders would switch productivity suites
