ShiftControl is a software company that delivers a SaaS management platform designed to help startups and small businesses streamline IT operations and keep critical systems and data secure. Founded in 2023 by Julien Monguillot and Dan Gericke and headquartered in Singapore, ShiftControl helps its customers build their employee-IT on a solid foundation from the beginning, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars shoring up their environments later on.
Helping startups and SMBs prioritize IT security early on
While there’s no shortage of IT management and security solutions for enterprise organizations, few companies are building the same tools for startups and small to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from a couple to 200 employees.
“We kept hearing about small businesses being hacked left and right,” Julien says. “When you look a little bit deeper at those hacks, you realize that very often it was identity-focused, nothing too complex. We knew that identity was really one of the core pillars that you need to have in place as a starting point for IT security.”
To bring IT security to startups and SMBs and keep bad actors at bay, Julien and Dan — former colleagues at ExpressVPN — founded ShiftControl.
“We wanted to build an identity platform on top of an existing identity provider that made it accessible for small businesses to actually manage identity properly because most solutions on the market today are very complicated to use,” Dan says.
Choosing JumpCloud as the pillar of their platform
Julien and Dan were already familiar with JumpCloud, having explored its RADIUS solution at their previous job. While searching for a solution to build on top of, the team ran a LinkedIn poll asking their network to vote for the best identity provider.
“JumpCloud won by a landslide,” Dan says.
After the poll results were finalized, Dan reached out to JumpCloud CEO Rajat Bhargava, who mentioned that he’d be in Singapore soon and suggested meeting up.
“What’s interesting is that JumpCloud is a large company; and someone like Raj — who is founder and CEO — was willing to meet with us and was happy to talk to us. That kind of forged the beginning of our relationship with JumpCloud.”
Dan Gericke, Co-Founder at ShiftControl
Liking the conversation with Raj, the team began researching JumpCloud further and ultimately decided it was the exact tool they were looking for.
“We built our UI on top of JumpCloud so small businesses could start using it,” Dan explains, adding that ShiftControl is a member of the JumpCloud Partner Program. “We think of it as helping the first HR person, the first accountant, or the first nontechnical founder manage IT for the organization. ShiftControl allows people to start their IT maturity journey much earlier in the company lifecycle instead of having to spend several hundred thousand dollars maybe two years in at the hypergrowth stage. By using ShiftControl, they can get things right much earlier at a very reasonable cost and then move forward from there. I look at ShiftControl as JumpCloud optimized for small businesses.”
Accelerating the journey to IT maturity while giving founders more time to focus on the big picture
By leveraging JumpCloud’s feature-rich nature, the ShiftControl team has been able to deliver a powerful identity management solution to startups and SMBs, ensuring its customers start their journey to IT maturity on the right foot.
“Once you have that identity management, it enables you to do a lot of other cool stuff,” Julien says. “You can start solving problems around making onboarding and offboarding more efficient and secure. You get a source of truth for managing SaaS, which will then help you with compliance and all those other elements.”
When small businesses are just starting out, founders have so many decisions to make about pretty much everything. Rather than spending a ton of time thinking about designing their IT environment, ShiftControl helps founders focus more of their attention on the big picture.
“We’re quite opinionated as a tool, because we know what ‘good’ looks like,” Julien continues. “We tell people, ‘You don’t need to make these choices. We’re helping you make these choices.’”
IT security out of the gate
By building their platform on top of JumpCloud, ShiftControl is able to ensure that its clients have a strong security posture right away.
“The earlier you get started on this journey, the easier it is later,” Dan says. “We work with incubators and VCs to get people on ShiftControl from day one of incorporation. The second you’re buying your domain and Google Workspace, you should be on ShiftControl. We can make everything so much easier and set up most things for you so you don’t have to spend the time in your first few weeks doing any of this stuff.”
Using JumpCloud, ShiftControl is able to enable single sign-on (SSO) and SCIM across most core customer applications without breaking the bank.
“We realized that most of our customers maybe have three to five SSO-enabled services, maybe two of them are SCIM-enabled, and they’d have to pay a lot of money to upgrade any other services. That’s a significant amount of change in OPEX in a very short amount of time if you want that maturity. We’re trying to bring that maturity into the company in a different way early on, and JumpCloud enables us to build that.”
Dan Gericke, Co-Founder at ShiftControl
Recently, Julien was talking to a prospect who’d just onboarded a new employee about that user’s password.
“I asked him, ‘Do you have any sense of how strong their Google Workspace password is? How do you know they’re not reusing a password that’s been leaked in the last data breach?’” Julien says. “That’s the aha moment for a lot of founders and leaders. As soon as we put in SSO for our customers, and they start seeing the real benefits of multi-factor-authentication, they usually make the move to Password Manager as well and feel like they’re in a much better position security-wise.”
Optimizing identity management
ShiftControl leverages and augments JumpCloud’s user groups to set up teams for customers, many of whom are so early stage they don’t even have a concept of departments, Dan says. To prevent headaches down the road, ShiftControl sets up automated group memberships and departments “based on how we think a normal business works.”
“Maybe we start out with sales and marketing and operations and R&D or something like that,” Dan explains. “Then we can grow the groups from there. When our clients are ready and they have grown a little bit more, the infrastructure is there and they don’t have to redo everything.”
Recently, the team onboarded a new customer and was explaining how they can group users by location.
“If you just want to email everyone in Singapore, for example, you can, and keeping the group membership updated automatically is easy!” Dan says. “It blew their minds. They didn’t know that was possible.”
Deep visibility into SaaS contracts
ShiftControl delivers a source of truth for all people and apps, accessible in a single place. This gives its customers much-needed visibility into SaaS contracts. While an enterprise might be able to easily absorb the costs associated with overlooking a contract renewal and having to pay for software they don’t use, the same can’t be said of startups.
“All of our customers have gone through the scribble of like, what are all the SaaS apps we’re paying for and who has access to what, and it’s a nightmare,” Julien says.
By consolidating all apps in one place, ShiftControl’s customers can see at a glance when renewals are up, enabling them to increase the chances they only pay for tools they actually need.
“One company had 50 major SaaS apps, and spend was all over the place,” Dan explains. “Once you get the apps into our system, you can start adding your contract information so you can begin seeing which decisions you have to make about contracts that are about to renew and which you can push down the road a bit, which helps you prioritize.”
A partner they can grow with
In JumpCloud, Dan and Julien have found a partner committed to their success.
“I’ve been joining more of these fireside chats for MSPs and I have to say I was really pleasantly surprised,” Julien says. “I expected something quite big and not super personal, but it turns out it was very small groups and really good conversation. What jumped out at me is JumpCloud is trying to build a community around resellers and MSPs, and they’re doing a pretty good job. I’d strongly recommend people join those.”
Looking ahead, the ShiftControl team plans to create an automated onboarding guide for new customers that will enable them to set up each environment to their exact specifications much faster. At the same time, they’re also planning to roll out additional JumpCloud features to deliver even more value to clients.
“We don’t have mobile device management exposed in our platform yet, but we plan on adding it soon,” Dan concludes.
About JumpCloud
JumpCloud® delivers a unified identity, device, and access management platform that makes it easy to securely manage identities, devices, and access across your organization. With JumpCloud, IT teams and MSPs enable users to work securely from anywhere and manage their Windows, Apple, Linux, and Android devices from a single platform.
Learn more: https://www.jumpcloud.com/
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Want to see ShiftControl in action? Schedule a demo or reach out to the founders for a chat at [email protected].