Asheville Recovery Center is a treatment center in North Carolina that helps struggling individuals beat drug addiction and alcoholism through a rehabilitation program. Founded in 2016, Asheville Recovery Center has helped clients from all 50 states.
Needing to simplifying IT management across six facilities
When Taylor Rummelt joined Asheville Recovery Center in 2017, he had all different kinds of responsibilities, including managing IT.
“I took over the networking here, ran all the cables, got the cameras set up, configured the network, changed our entire infrastructure from just like a generic WiFi router in the back corner of the office to a mesh network,” he explains.
A couple years later, Asheville Recovery Center forged a partnership with another local organization that had had six different locations spread out across Boston, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Rummelt was tasked with overseeing IT for the partnership.
“We had to get real creative with the infrastructure there,” says Rummelt, who’s worked in the private substance abuse facility industry for 12 years across all roles — from overnight technician to executive director and everything in between — and currently serves as head of digital marketing.
Choosing feature-rich JumpCloud to centralize IT
In particular, Rummelt was looking for a better solution to identity management and device management. Initially, the partner organizations were using Google Credential Provider for Windows for both purposes, which “kind of worked but not really.”
Due to the way they operate, staff members routinely share devices as they go about their days, logging in and creating accounts as needed.
“The problem is that every time that happens, I have to physically be there or remote into that computer to then go in and remove those users when their sessions are done so no one else could log into their accounts,” Rummelt continues. “It was very cumbersome.”
Seeking a better way forward, Rummelt began to look for a solution that would enable him to manage identities and devices in the cloud. As a self-described Apple and Google guy, he didn’t really want to learn the ins and outs of Azure; but even if the organization did end up going in that direction, it still wouldn’t help them manage the Apple side of the house.
“With Azure, I wasn’t able to manage iPads, I wasn’t able to manage Mac devices, and I wasn’t able to manage iPhones,” Rummelt says, adding that he didn’t want to use multiple solutions unless he had no choice. “Having to manage things in two different portals would drive me nuts. There’s nothing I hate more than having to accomplish one goal by using a fractured system.”
After considering options like Splashtop, NinjaRMM, and Kandji, Rummelt ultimately came across JumpCloud — which “checked all of my boxes.”
“I started messing around with JumpCloud and fell in love,” he continues. “With JumpCloud, I could manage a six-facility infrastructure by myself without needing to spend $75,000 a year on somebody’s dedicated salary.”
Protecting sensitive healthcare data & ensuring HIPAA compliance
Though that partnership has ended, Asheville Recovery Center has used JumpCloud ever since. Today, it’s primarily used for identity and device management, Rummelt says, adding that he manages 200 users through the platform. The organization also uses JumpCloud for policy management, patch management, and software updates.
Before rolling out JumpCloud, “too many people had admin access,” Rummelt explains. These excess privileges caused a number of productivity-killing issues.
“I’d go into somebody’s computer and there would be every antivirus software you could possibly think of installed on it,” he explains. “I was like, ‘Why do you have Norton and Windows Defender and McAfee and Malwarebytes?’ They were like, ‘I don’t know. I just thought the more, the better.’”
JumpCloud has enabled Rummelt to solve these kinds of problems entirely, ensuring optimal device performance.
“The ability for us to set permissions at the terminal level was a massive game-changer.”
Improved onboarding and offboarding
With JumpCloud, Rummelt’s been able to expedite both the onboarding and offboarding processes. Recently, the organization moved to BambooHR, which seamlessly connects with JumpCloud. As a result, once a new user record is created in Bamboo, their account automatically populates in JumpCloud, and Rummelt can extend that identity across everything connected to JumpCloud.
“It’s one less step that we have to do for onboarding,” Rummelt says. “When we want to remove somebody from the system or add somebody to the system, I can do it from my iPad, from my phone, from my computer — even from another state. At the time, that was super convenient because Massachusetts is quite a ways away from North Carolina.”
Compliance made easy
As an organization that operates in the healthcare industry, Asheville Recovery Center is laser-focused on protecting sensitive client data to comply with HIPAA mandates.
“We need to make sure that people are accessing protected health information from secure devices — even if they’re at their home and want to access files to do notes or something,” Rummelt says, adding that he’s configured JumpCloud to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive information from authorized devices.
Due to the nature of their work, some of the organization’s employees are in recovery themselves; they’ve gone through the program and want to give back to the community. Unfortunately, the risk of relapse never fully goes away.
“We don’t want somebody who’s actively relapsing to have unattended access to our devices or protected health information, client charts, emails, and things like that,” he continues. “We want to make sure that all that stuff is secured and, if need be, we can disconnect certain devices and lock out certain users. And we can do whatever we need to do with JumpCloud.”
A stronger security posture
Using JumpCloud, Rummelt has instituted several policies to improve the organization’s overall security posture.
For starters, rather than giving workers free reign to load apps onto their devices, he pushes out approved software to them, ensuring they have access to the tools they need to work — including Chrome, the Adobe suite, and the security camera software the facility uses to monitor client behavior.
Additionally, Rummelt has disabled USB drives on devices so that no one can steal data by copying it to a thumb drive or compromise machines by loading malware onto them via USB.
“At the same time, if a client somehow got hold of an iPad or something and figured out the access code, we can go in and force a password change,” he says. “We can do what we need to do to secure any type of data by following a very easy process.”
On top of this, Rummelt has also implemented multi-factor authentication as a requirement to “log into anything sensitive,” further strengthening the organization’s security stance.
A platform that keeps growing
In JumpCloud, Rummelt has found a feature-rich solution that not only makes his life easier but also enables him to future-proof IT management.
“Another thing that’s great is constantly getting updates from JumpCloud — hey, here’s what’s coming soon,” Rummelt continues.
Would Rummelt recommend JumpCloud to other IT administrators?
“Everywhere I go, I tell people about JumpCloud,” Rummelt says. “I’ve not found an alternative that has the same UI or UX. It’s very smooth and very user-friendly, and it’s got a giant big green button when you want to add a new device or a user. I have zero bad things to say about JumpCloud. It checks all of my boxes, and it’s correctly priced — no questions about it.”
About JumpCloud
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