This e-commerce company builds personalized marketing and search solutions that hundreds of major corporate websites around the world rely on. Founded over a decade ago and headquartered in California, the remote-first company has a distributed team of 1,000 workers that includes employees, freelancers, contractors, vendors, and interns.
Seeking to simplify & streamline IT management
In 2022, Frank G. joined the e-commerce company as director IT. A veteran of the industry, he cut his teeth back in 1981 as a software developer, switching infrastructure management ahead of Y2K.
When he joined the company, the IT footprint was a bit cluttered.
“I did walk into an interesting situation,” Frank says with a laugh. “We had Okta, Jamf, Active Directory, you name it. We were all over the place.”
The cacophonic nature of the company’s IT infrastructure can be attributed to the fact that the organization acquired a couple of businesses over the years to continue fueling its growth.
“I was trying to simplify our environment,” Frank continues. “I didn’t want to use Okta for this and Jamf for that, for example.”
Replacing Okta & Active Directory with JumpCloud out of the gate
Before Frank came on board, the decision to use JumpCloud had already been made. The team was in the process of migrating off of Okta as the first move with JumpCloud, and then Frank decided to ditch Active Directory next.
“I was an Active Directory person for most of my career in infrastructure,” Frank says. “And the way we were using Active Directory was just a disaster. Once we disconnected from Okta, we tried to move all of the applications that we’re using LDAP away from Active Directory and move them towards JumpCloud.”
The initial projects were “very, very successful.”
“Now, we’ve severed the bond between JumpCloud and Active Directory, and we are 100% on JumpCloud now,” Frank continues.
According to Frank, the company’s IT environment is roughly 75% Macs, 23% Windows, and 2% Linux. When he started working there, the company had Jamf for mobile device management, which worked to an extent but left much to be desired.
“Jamf didn’t solve all my problems anyway because 25% of my fleet is non-macOS; Jamf is great for macOS, but it doesn’t help me with my Windows or Linux machines,” Frank says. “JumpCloud gives me mobile device management for the entirety of my fleet and also lets me connect my legacy apps via LDAP, so it’s a really nice solution. It’s really elegant.”
Unlocking the full power of JumpCloud’s feature-rich nature
The way Frank sees it, JumpCloud gives him everything he needs to manage IT through a single pane of glass.
“It gives me the cloud directory, it gives me SSO, and it gives me multi-factor authentication,” he says. “It’s a nice solution for our environment because it does everything I need it to do. It gives me one place to look for all the things that we need to do on a day-to-day basis as an IT organization. This is particularly helpful because we’re a team of 12, with six on the help desk. It’s a small team supporting 1,000 remote users.”
JumpCloud and Google Workspace integration
Since the e-commerce company uses Google for enterprise applications, Frank and his team are particularly fond of the integration between JumpCloud and Google Workspace.
“It works the way we want it to, and we don’t have to beat either product too badly to make it work,” Frank says with a laugh. “It’s a really great solution for us.”
“Our environment is probably 98% SaaS,” he continues, adding that JumpCloud’s SSO tool has been a game-changer. “It makes my life easier being able to just connect it to SAML and call it a day.”
Increasing security with commands, patch management & conditional access policies
Frank and his team utilize JumpCloud commands, some that they’ve built internally and others that they’ve taken from JumpCloud’s command library.
“Commands have been a godsend for us,” he says. “We’re using them to remove security-related software that shouldn’t be there or installing or updating various applications.”
The IT team has implemented several policies around device posture — like ensuring disks are encrypted and that they time out after not being used for a while. They’ve also rolled out conditional access policies to further protect sensitive data.
“Conditional access gives me the ability to prevent certain users from downloading data that they are not authorized to download, and I can prevent other users from screenshotting data in sensitive applications, too,” Frank says. “I don’t have to worry about a lot of things.”
Additionally, Frank and his team keep devices, operating systems, browsers, and other software up to date using patch management. They also use Password Manager to store, protect, and manage passwords.
Zero-touch deployments
Frank and his team are also using JumpCloud for zero-touch deployment of Mac machines.
“It’s beautiful, it’s perfect — I can ship a new user a Mac from any of our distributors, and off it goes,” he says, adding that he’s looking forward to implementing the same capabilities for Windows machines in the future.
Looking ahead, Frank and his team are looking into dynamic groups and are waiting to test JumpCloud Go to further enhance authentication.
Add it all up, and you can see what Frank means when he says JumpCloud gives him everything he needs over one platform.
“I’m terrifically happy about JumpCloud,” Frank 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.
To see the power of JumpCloud with your own eyes, request a demo or start a 30-day trial today.