The hipages Group is a technology company that connects homeowners with trade workers via an online marketplace and also provides trade companies with a purpose-built app designed to simplify business management. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Sydney, hipages serves customers across Australia and New Zealand. The company, which is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange, has nearly 300 employees spread across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and China.
Lacking a Centralized Way to Manage Users
With a team spread out across four countries that was using Windows and Mac devices and upwards of 30 different SaaS tools, the hipages IT team lacked a way to manage all of its users from one location.
“Our Windows users were on Active Directory, and our macOS users were unmanaged, which was a major problem for us,” explains Chris Grisdale, head of information security at hipages.
From a mobile device management (MDM) point of view, hipages was using Meraki MDM on an ad hoc basis across their devices.
“At a high level, there were many platforms used that were hard to manage for the IT operations team,” he continues. “One of the main challenges we were facing was figuring out how to centrally manage users and devices from one platform and efficiently onboard and offboard users to our environment.”
Solving the Problem — and Many Others — with JumpCloud
As Grisdale and his team began looking for a solution that would enable them to manage all users, devices, and applications more efficiently and effectively, they came across JumpCloud. Not only did JumpCloud provide a centralized platform for MDM that works with Windows and Mac devices, it also provided identity and access management (IAM) and Zero Trust capabilities.
“JumpCloud was able to provide all of these functionalities centrally,” Grisdale says. “Additionally, we were looking for a platform that our IT operations team could easily navigate within one cloud-native dashboard, and JumpCloud checked that box, too.”
Transforming Their Business from the Ground Up
The hipages Group recently went through an IT and security maturity uplift program. According to Grisdale, JumpCloud played a key role in ensuring the initiative’s success.
“Overall, the JumpCloud platform has transformed our business from the ground up to operate more efficiently, effectively, and — most importantly — securely,” Grisdale explains.
With that in mind, here are some of the main ways hipages has benefited from its decision to invest in JumpCloud.
Becoming a truly cloud-native organization
With JumpCloud, hipages was able to move away from Active Directory and become a pure cloud-native organization. As a result, the IT team doesn’t have to spend incredible amounts of time managing infrastructure — which enables them to focus more on other mission-critical areas of operations.
Streamlining onboarding and offboarding processes
JumpCloud has also helped hipages optimize their onboarding and offboarding processes, much to the delight of IT and new hires.
“We’ve seen an increase in time saved for onboarding and offboarding employees with a centralized approach for all application authentication,” Grisdale says. “We’re hoping to automate this even further with integration with our new HRIS system in the next 12 months.”
Improving security
Thanks to JumpCloud, hipages has been able to significantly strengthen its security stance.
“We implemented JumpCloud to centrally manage our end-users’ identities, devices, SSO authentication, MFA, and set conditional access policies for Zero Trust,” Grisdale continues. “We were also able to configure our macOS profiles to ensure an easy integration and implementation of our new endpoint detection and response tool and next-generation secure web gateway platforms.”
Looking ahead, the hipages team plans to use JumpCloud to improve security even further.
“We’re hoping to use JumpCloud for RADIUS access at our offices over the next 12 months,” Grisdale explains. “After that, we will have utilized all of JumpCloud’s capabilities.”
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.