Article is an e-commerce business that sells modern indoor and outdoor furniture and aims to make the furniture shopping experience as easy and enjoyable as possible. Over the last few years, it’s also been one of the fastest-growing businesses in Canada. The company — which was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Vancouver — has more than 1,300 employees across the globe, with offices and locations spread out across Canada, the United States, and Vietnam.
Transitioning to Remote Work Without the Ability to Manage Devices
Like many organizations, Article is a company with modern IT Infrastructure on the cloud and a heterogeneous end-user platform that includes Windows, Mac, and Linux devices.
“COVID changed how IT operates within an organization and we were not an exception,” explains Salar Sahraeian, Article’s manager of IT. “As with many other companies, immediately after making the switch to work from home, we realized Article did not have the proper technology in place to manage and monitor our devices in the new remote world.”
“We wanted to have the ability to protect access, data, and customer information,” Sahraeian continues. “As we were still growing a company during the pandemic, we also wanted to manage end-user devices, identities, and implement more security before we grew larger than what we were.”
Controlling Every Device from One Place with JumpCloud
To resolve this issue, Sahraeian and his team considered multiple tools, including Azure Active Directory. “Having a modern IT Infrastructure, none of the tools provided us with a feasible solution since we needed to introduce other tools to cover our mixed-platform devices,” he says. “In doing so, we were still missing many required features like IdP and security.”
Seeking a more efficient way forward, Sahraeian began looking for a tool that would enable the Article team to manage identity, access, and devices from a single pane of glass.
After researching their options and considering many different products, the team ultimately came across JumpCloud, demoed it for 15 days, and knew it was the best solution for their needs — especially considering the high-touch support the JumpCloud team provided out of the gate.
“We wanted a solution that enabled us to manage and monitor all of our devices, while securing our data,” Sahraeian continues. “And that’s exactly what JumpCloud provided us with.”
Unified Device Management Made Easy
Thanks to JumpCloud, Article is now set up to scale, with JumpCloud keeping pace alongside them. Thanks to the many benefits the team has experienced over the last couple of years, they’re confident they made the right decision in trusting JumpCloud for mobile device management.
1. Fast results
The IT team wanted the ability to manage all of their devices as quickly as possible. To make that happen, Sahraeian contacted a local college and got three interns to help with the process.
“We measured the success of this initiative by managing to deploy JumpCloud to over 700 devices and all of our Particles (People of Article), all over the world,” Sahraeian says. “It was very successful.”
2. A resilient tool
The last thing any company wants is to implement a new tool only to find out the hard way it’s not reliable or doesn’t meet their expectations. Over the last two years, JumpCloud has proven to be a resilient solution that Sahraeian and his team have already grown to rely on.
“One of my team members at the time was saying, ‘I keep wanting to break it, and it doesn’t break,’” Sahraeian continues. “If you have a tool that doesn’t break, that’s a good tool.”
3. Improved security
Before JumpCloud, many of Article’s users had different passwords for their laptops and their email accounts, which were used to log into other applications. “It wasn’t secure because we would set up a temporary password for the laptop but some team members would never change it,” Sahraeian says.
To solve this problem, the Article team utilized JumpCloud to synchronize laptop passwords with email passwords. Now, each user has a unique, complex password for all accounts.
“Right off the bat, JumpCloud secured our environment a lot,” he says. “It also gave us visibility into and ability to manage all of our devices.”
4. Increased productivity
Since Article teams use a ton of different tools, software updates — like a new version of MacOS or Windows 11 — have always been a problem in terms of interoperability. By pushing out policies with JumpCloud, the Article team has solved this problem, which reduces downtime and, in turn, increases productivity.
“One of the things we’ve been using policies for is controlling Operating Systems’ updates,” Sahraeian continues. “We prevent interoperability by ensuring laptops don’t update until the new operating systems are more stable.”
5. Streamlined onboarding
Prior to JumpCloud, Sahraeian and his team had to jump through a lot of hoops to onboard new users. “We had to go to Google, Slack, Zoom, Freshdesk — all those platforms — and it took a lot of time from us,” he says.
After building integrations with those tools, the onboarding process has become a breeze — moving from two hours per user to less than 30 minutes.
“All we do is create the user in JumpCloud and fill out the information, and add them to appropriate groups for tools they need access to,” Sahraeian continues. “Our onboarding time was cut very, very short, and it’s been great.”
6. Increased compliance
Looking into the future, Sahraeian and his team are focused on achieving SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which demonstrates that an organization is committed to thoroughly securing its systems. And JumpCloud is playing a pivotal role in this process.
“We’re using JumpCloud for SSO and MFA,” Sahraeian explains. “Now, anyone who logs in to any of our applications is forced to do multi-factor authentications using JumpCloud.”
7. Proactive IT
In the past, the IT team would wait for users to come to them with problems and then respond. With JumpCloud, Sahraeian and his team are able to monitor devices in real time, which enables them to take a proactive stance to IT issues. “JumpCloud notifies us in the form of a ticket every time there’s a password that’s locked, so my support team can actually go to users and ask if they need a reset,” he continues.
Recently, a laptop belonging to an Article employee was stolen, and the IT team was quick to act. “Using JumpCloud, we managed to erase a laptop and lock it so it would become a brick,” Sahraeian says. “We just lose the asset, but we don’t lose data and we don’t risk customer information.”
Looking ahead, Article plans to implement Zero Trust Security and zero-touch onboarding.
“Every possible feature that JumpCloud has, we’re using or considering using,” Sahraeian concludes.
Learn More About JumpCloud
JumpCloud changes the way IT administrators manage their organizations by providing a comprehensive and flexible cloud directory platform. From one pane of glass, manage user identities and resource access, secure Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, and get a full view of your environment.
Get started with JumpCloud today.