JumpCloud Can Reduce Costs for Access and Identity Management Between 40-60% While Increasing Agility and Hardening Security Postures

By Nathan McAfee, Senior Economic Analyst
Enterprise Strategy Group
May 2023

Introduction

This Economic Validation from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) focused on the quantitative and qualitative benefits organizations can expect from migrating their identity and access management to JumpCloud’s open directory platform to lower costs, increase agility, remove complexity, and improve security posture.

Challenges

Business requirements are changing faster than most organizations can react to and provide IT capabilities that both enable users and protect assets. With rapid shifts towards hybrid workspaces and distributed environments, the challenge of providing access has increased exponentially. These challenges include:

• Increased complexity of the IT ecosystem – A mix of on-premise and cloud systems results in a fragmented IT environment that is complex and often creates identity silos. In these scenarios, each user logs in with multiple identities across the variety of systems and creates a mess for IT administrators and governance architects trying to enforce consistency in access permissions across these various platforms. 
• Variety of devices and operating systems – IT administrators must issue and support a range of devices to meet the needs of their employees. Companies that have a combination of Windows, Mac, and Linux, iOS, and Android variants often find themselves having to deploy multiple tools to manage their fleet of devices managing multiple identity solutions with little interoperability between the systems. 
• Lack of control over user access – Without a singular, centralized directory service, IT administrators are forced to do redundant work across the different identity systems and often find that access permissions are different for equivalent users on different platforms.
• Compliance requirements – Many organizations are operating in industries with compliance requirements that force them to show proof that identities and access are being controlled within set guidelines. Companies that maintain multiple identity solutions find themselves unable to efficiently and accurately provide these assurances to auditors and senior management. 
• Security threats – These threats are increasing in frequency and sophistication, especially in distributed work environments. With each additional system needed to manage an environment comes increased risk from both intentional and accidental events.
• High IT costs – The cost of each identity system needed increases overall IT spending in hardware, software, and expertise. Additionally, companies that run parallel systems, or those not developed for distributed environments, find they spend substantial time and money on redundant tasks.
• Increased technical debt – Technical debt, or long-term costs and challenges resulting from short-sighted decisions, drains a portion of current IT budgets to service the systems put in place with the mindset of “right now” instead of “right for our business needs.” According to insights from 50 CIOs surveyed by McKinsey, technical debt now consumes 40% of the total IT balance sheet for the typical organization.

The Solution: JumpCloud Cloud-based Open Directory Platform

JumpCloud’s cloud-based open directory platform enables organizations to manage user and system identities regardless of the resource location, whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both. JumpCloud provides centralized user and device management through a cloud-based console that provides granularity in control while stripping much of the complexity out of managing dispersed and growing ecosystems.

JumpCloud provides a singular identity across entire technology stacks and integrates with resources in a way that provides controlled yet frictionless access for users. As seen in Figure 1, JumpCloud provides unified management across identity, access, and devices in a way that removes complexity while maintaining security and the ability to apply and enforce governance.

JumpCloud customers report an increase in the ability to control access and resources as well as reductions in cost, both in annual operating budgets and in technical. Technical debt is the long-term cost incurred by companies making changes based on short-term pressures instead of using strategic thinking that best aligns technology capabilities with business initiatives.

Enterprise Strategy Group Economic Validation

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) completed a quantitative economic analysis of JumpCloud to understand the impact that deploying JumpCloud’s Cloud-based open directory platform can have on an organization’s ability to reach technology and business goals. ESG’s Economic Validation process is a proven method for understanding, validating, quantifying, and modeling the economic value propositions of a product or solution. The process leverages ESG’s core competencies in market and industry analysis, forward-looking research, and technical/economic validation. ESG conducted in-depth interviews with end users to better understand and quantify how JumpCloud has impacted their organizations, particularly in comparison with previously deployed and/or experienced solutions. The qualitative and quantitative findings were used as the basis for a simple economic model comparing the expected costs and benefits of JumpCloud against traditional directory services. 

JumpCloud Economic Overview

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) economic analysis revealed that JumpCloud provides its customers with significant savings and benefits in the following categories:

• Improved cost-effectiveness – JumpCloud reduces costs in infrastructure, licensing, IT administration, and increases user productivity while facilitating increased revenue.
• Increased business agility – JumpCloud provides almost instant flexibility while lowering the complexity that comes with change. IT administrators are more efficient and end users find their work environment more streamlined. 
• Improved security posture and governance – JumpCloud accelerates the digital journey towards zero trust and ensures that a consistent security posture is enforced across all client devices.

Improved Cost Effectiveness

ESG’s financial model shows a reduction in costs between 40-60% when comparing JumpCloud to traditional identity and access systems, as well as a potential increase in revenue of between .5%-2%. By shifting from on-premises systems to JumpCloud’s cloud-based infrastructure, organizations remove much of the complexity associated with traditional identity and access while gaining the ability to rapidly scale capacity up and down without large capital expenses as business requirements change. During customer interviews, ESG found these items to contribute to improved cost effectiveness:

• Elimination of infrastructure – JumpCloud is a cloud-based service that manages users and systems regardless of their location. Customers reported that along with eliminating directory software and server costs, JumpCloud alleviated the need to pay for separate services including multi-factor authentication systems (MFA), RADIUS servers, and single sign-on (SSO) systems. As one customer shared, “JumpCloud has eliminated multiple systems, products, and tasks. We have reduced our overall costs as well as the complexity of our systems.”
• Lower administrative costs – Based on customer interviews, ESG created a modeled scenario that showed a 10-20% lower IT administrative cost for JumpCloud environments. This savings stemmed from the elimination of maintenance of on-site systems as well as a reduction in administrative complexity. Additionally, customers migrating to JumpCloud from traditional identity and access systems realize a cost benefit through the reduction in the number of vendor relationships to manage.
  • “We easily save 10-20% of our FTE costs associated with identity as access management, as well as enable more junior resources to manage these processes. Vendor management has gone from being a time-sink to something that is easy.”
• Accelerated onboarding – The time between when a new employee starts and when they are generating a positive return on their cost is critical both in revenue and employee retention. Almost 1/3 of new hires leave their job within the first 90 days of starting. It is important to immediately enable that new hire with system access. ESG found that JumpCloud facilitated a new-hire experience that was faster for system access when compared with alternative environments. One specific environment shared during customer interviews was through an integration between JumpCloud and Apple’s business manager, about which they reported that they now have new-hire information automatically pre-loaded on their computer system. This onboarding experience is faster, easier, and ensures compliance with the appropriate level of access that person should have. “It is like rolling out a red carpet to our new hires.”
• Increased revenue – Complexity slows the ability to react to changing conditions and new opportunities. ESG found that the flexibility provided by JumpCloud allows organizations to take advantage of business opportunities that might be passed over with traditional access systems. The ability to have full visibility into, and control of, a zero trust environment provides the level of assurance that rapid change can be undertaken in a secure and organized fashion. ESG’s financial model shows improved revenue between .5% and 2% with the higher improvements coming in companies that are able to harness short-term, or gig, workers to capitalize on seasonal and project-based opportunities.
• Reduced technical debt – Technical debt is an increase in IT tasks that are required to remedy short-sighted decisions of the past. Organizations with high levels of technical debt find up to 40% of their annual budget squandered by the need to remedy systems that are often outdated or isolated and see customer churn that is higher than optimal and limited growth. ESG found that JumpCloud customers were able to eliminate large portions of technical debt when replacing legacy access systems and were able to accelerate their journeys towards digital maturity. 
• Flexibility in pricing model – In addition to eliminating infrastructure, licensing, and tasks required with traditional access systems, ESG found that customers benefit from simple and predictable costing models such as JumpCloud’s. JumpCloud has a clear, per-user pricing model that is tiered based on desired capabilities and month-to-month pricing that allows for instant scalability, up and down. As one customer shared, “JumpCloud’s easy pricing model gives me clarity into what we are spending, and why.”

“We easily save 10-20% of our FTE costs associated with identity as access management, as well as enable more junior resources to manage these processes. Vendor management has gone from being a time-sink to something that is easy.”

Increased Business Agility

“Most of our growth is through acquisition. In the past, it would take us months to bring new systems up to our security posture. With JumpCloud, this is down to days. This caused us to sometimes limit our aggressiveness for potential growth. Now, our assimilation costs are lower by an average of 50%.” 

– VP of Technology, gaming development

Change is important to the growth and well-being of most organizations. The changes that COVID-19 brought to businesses in 2020 forced an almost immediate shift towards hybrid workforces and created a work environment where each employee was their own individual office/location. The changes in the attitudes of workers who now want the flexibility of hybrid or work-from-home jobs has forced companies to implement IT systems and governance plans that protect thousands of locations while enabling their workers to access company systems as if they were in a central office. ESG found that JumpCloud facilitates increased business agility through capabilities that include:

• Increased visibility – Organizations with multiple systems providing identity and access control find their admins bouncing between interfaces, with different taxonomies and report structures. The result is redundant work, holes in access plans, and lack of visibility into improvement needs. ESG found that JumpCloud customers immediately benefit from increased visibility at deployment and were able to generate clear and actionable plans to increase security posture and reduce administrative cost because of the insight provided by JumpCloud. One interviewee summarized, “With JumpCloud I can see the connections between users, their devices, and their access levels in a single pane of glass. This is important to us because we support devices that are Windows, Macs, and multiple variants of Linux.”
• Ease of integration – JumpCloud integrates with a wide range of applications, platforms, and services that allow organizations to easily integrate with their existing infrastructure and rapidly deploy new capabilities with the assurance that JumpCloud’s capabilities tie into the new functions. During customer interviews, integrations with human resources information systems (HRIS) and SaaS platforms G Suite and Microsoft 365 were specifically called out as “game changers” because of their ability to enable employees while maintaining consistent governance for all systems.
• Lowered complexity – Complexity increases costs, lowers agility, throttles growth, and creates the potential for security risks and human error. JumpCloud eliminates the need for multiple systems. With each system removed, the overall complexity is reduced. JumpCloud’s ability to provide a clear view of all assets and users and ensure a consistent security posture across all assets was, “….outside our reach in the past because the expertise needed to plan and implement all of the systems that JumpCloud replaced was hard to find, and harder to keep.”

“JumpCloud gives us the abilities of a very complex system, without the complexity.” 

– Head of IT, hospitality

Improved Security Posture

Security is a top priority for every organization, and the business risks associated with breaches increase every year. Organizations that find themselves with a mixture of client systems across disparate locations are at even higher risk. ESG found that organizations that deploy JumpCloud can improve their security posture and better assure their senior leadership that they are protected in areas that include:

• Hardened security – JumpCloud allows administrators to set security policies that ensure digital assets meet certain criteria before they are given access to company assets and provide consistent levels of access that make sure users have access to materials and services intended for their roles and levels. Interviewed customers shared stories of their pre-JumpCloud deployment that had differing levels of access, and in some cases, unmanaged computers. JumpCloud allowed them to almost immediately ensure that all systems were brought up to the security posture of the organization.
• Path to zero trust – Zero trust is not a destination; it is a security philosophy that separates all users, devices, and applications and treats each as if it was hostile or untrusted. Each request for access must be verified before access is granted. This approach requires careful planning, and constant monitoring of the entire system. While zero trust is a logical goal for all companies, most organizations find their ability to plan and implement zero trust outside their capabilities. ESG found JumpCloud to be an effective cornerstone of a zero trust plan that can improve security posture and lessen the risk of data breaches and cyber attacks. 
• Increased governance – consistency across operating systems – Increased governance gives an organization the framework and processes to ensure that standards, regulations, and company guidelines are followed. Companies that have higher levels of governance are able to make better decisions and provide assurance to leaders and auditors about the activities and compliance level of their organizations. Companies interviewed by ESG for this analysis report a much higher level of effectiveness with their governance policies, with one sharing, “JumpCloud has given us visibility into what is happening in our ecosystem, given us the tools to develop and enforce policies, and helped established an employee mindset of the value of governance. Because of JumpCloud, we have seen a reduction in shadow IT and can better assure our leaders that we are secure.”
• Reduction in human-based errors – Many security breaches and events are not acts with malicious intent. Human error contributes to quite a few occurrences. ESG was able to compare the administrative interface of JumpCloud with many traditional alternatives and found the environment logical, informative, and enabling. ESG believes that JumpCloud lessens the chance that security events may occur due to human errors.

“Before JumpCloud, our Mac computers were virtually unmanaged. We just couldn’t assure our management that we were secure. Each non-managed computer was an open hole for attack. With JumpCloud, we have a consistent security posture across all of our users and systems.” 

– Enterprise Manager, online retail

Enterprise Strategy Group Analysis

Why This Matters

Providing scalable and effective identity and access management is a necessity of organizations that have either outgrown manual systems or are hindered by the inflexibility or complexity of traditional systems.  

Enterprise Strategy Group validated that JumpCloud is a key component of a zero trust infrastructure that provides insight, flexibility, and security while replacing multiple systems.

ESG validated the savings and benefits in this analysis by running companies of varying sizes, hierarchies, and industries to ensure that numbers were reasonable across each modeled organization. ESG found that the savings and benefits applied to all tested configurations in a fairly linear pattern depending on the capabilities of the organization in their before-JumpCloud state.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) leveraged the information collected through vendor-provided material, public and industry knowledge of economics and technologies, and the results of customer interviews to create a three-year TCO/ROI model that compares the costs and benefits of JumpCloud with traditional directory solutions as well as standalone multi-factor authentication and single sign-on solutions. ESG’s interviews with customers who have recently made the transition, combined with experience and expertise in economic modeling and technical validation of JumpCloud, helped to form the basis for our modeled scenario. 

To validate our findings, ESG created a sample organization with 500 employees generating $90 Million USD annually. There were 6 main locations, with 50% of the employees working either remotely or in a hybrid arrangement. This company used traditional directory management to administer their mixture of Windows- and Mac-based users. Its employee turnover is 18% and its planned growth is 4%.

“JC was a great cornerstone to develop a solid governance plan. It simplified our processes by having everything in 1 place and allowed us to focus on building a culture of security.” 

– Enterprise Manager, online retail

Conclusion

As organizations grow in the number of locations, the number of devices supported, and overall complexity, they also find that the challenge of providing identity and access management increases exponentially. Employees need to be enabled with the appropriate access and resources to do their jobs; however, companies need to protect their assets and intellectual property from risks. These two goals seem diametrically opposed but must be met to ensure business can continue. To organize all of these users and devices, organizations use multiple point solutions or alternatively must leverage solutions from legacy vendors that restrict technology choice. Organizations often find themselves with a collection of methods that take care of only part of the problem or find themselves locked into single vendor ecosystems and unable to deploy best-of-breed tools to meet their specific needs. This mixture of solutions creates complexity and technical debt. Companies find that technical debt drains future IT budgets and limits organizational agility. 

The path of zero trust is utopia for most companies. Each asset and request is treated as if it was hostile and must prove to the network that it meets certain requirements in order to be trusted and processed. However, zero trust requires systems that work together and provide the overall visibility to ensure that access is controlled per the governance plans of the organization. Most companies find that zero trust is beyond their ability to implement due to a lack of expertise combined with the burden of technical debt.

JumpCloud is a cloud-based device and identity access management platform that provides unified capabilities that enable both users and IT management. JumpCloud is a cornerstone of a zero trust architecture and brings advanced capabilities without the complexity that comes with most other offerings.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyzed the impact that JumpCloud can have on businesses’ ability to reach their technical and business goals and found that JumpCloud can help organizations lower costs, improve agility, and harden their security posture. ESG believes that companies that either have challenges with their current directory product or are reaching the point where directory services are needed should consider JumpCloud as their solution.

This Enterprise Strategy Group Economic Validation was commissioned by JumpCloud and is distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc.