Sovrn provides products and services to thousands of online publishers to help them understand, operate, and grow their businesses. Sovrn is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, with offices in New York, and London.
With thousands of customers deploying advertising, affiliate marketing, and data products on more than 80,000 websites, Sovrn reaches 500 million active consumers across more than 40 billion page views every day.
Needing to manage endpoints & identities at scale
As the IT manager for Sovrn, Justen Starbuck is in charge of managing corporate device endpoints, internal network infrastructure, and identities through SAML authentication. To ensure Sovrn continues to operate with agility, Starbuck is always looking to streamline IT operations and make life easier for end users.
“Scalability is our biggest goal,” Starbuck says. “We need to be nimble and flexible with volume, scaling up and down effectively and efficiently.”
Expanding the already-existing JumpCloud footprint
As a former customer success manager at JumpCloud, Starbuck was thrilled to learn that Sovrn was already using JumpCloud when he came on board in June 2021.
“We’ve been with JumpCloud since the very beginning,” Starbuck explains. “Since I’ve been here, we’ve been a very early adopter of pretty much every single JumpCloud product that’s come to market. We love to be on the cutting edge with JumpCloud, and we’ve been very successful with 99% of what JumpCloud has to offer.”
Making life easier for everyone via a single pane of glass
As a former JumpCloud employee, Starbuck readily admits that he may be a bit biased. Even so, he can’t imagine managing IT without JumpCloud — and feels for those who do.
Starbuck continues: “JumpCloud gives you everything you need to manage devices and identities, and you can see everything through one pane of glass, with full autonomy over everything. ”
Improved end-user experiences & increased IT productivity
Starbuck is particularly impressed with JumpCloud Go, which enables secure passwordless authentication to JumpCloud-protected web resources on managed devices, and Automated Device Enrollment (ADE), which allows IT to automatically enroll devices to JumpCloud MDM — both of which help him save a ton of time.
“JumpCloud Go is one of the most revolutionary things,” Starbuck says. “The technical background of what it actually does is amazing. It reduces friction for end users and it makes my life headache-free.”
ADE has also been a game-changer for Starbuck; previously, the company was using Jamf for mobile device management, and it took 40 minutes to enroll each machine.
“JumpCloud ADE has made deployment for machines the most effortless thing I’ve ever had to do,” he says. “I set it up three years ago, iterated very slightly, and it’s something I can actually fully trust and never second-guess if it’s going to work.”
Now, Starbuck gets a fully automated deployment within five minutes.
“It’s a major reduction in your workload,” he says. “It’s going to win you over in a heartbeat.”
Streamlining identity management
The fact that JumpCloud integrates with AWS IAM Identity Center “makes life easier,” Starbuck says. “Instead of having to have a plethora of user groups within JumpCloud and assigning specific roles, we’re able to hone in on that management once we have all of our permission sets correct on Identity Center and we automatically know that those users will have the right roles on the first go and not have to modify it.”
Sovrn uses Jira’s service desk for ticketing and has created a whole workflow for temporarily elevating permissions through AWS and a script.
“An end user will put in whatever account they’re asking for, their role, and what team they’re on, and that information going through JumpCloud APIs to find the JumpCloud ID then runs the script to say, ‘Hey, Amazon, add them to the Identity Center group with those permissions temporarily,” Starbuck explains. “It’s just-in-time provisioning that reduces friction. In an emergency, end users don’t have to wait for me to add them to a group.”
Centralizing IT spend
Sovrn has taken advantage of the ability to procure JumpCloud through the AWS Marketplace where it gets other mission-critical apps, like Jira, Confluence, and Slack.
“One of the main reasons for that is to centralize spend and make it easier to track,” Starbuck explains.
If you’re considering a solution like JumpCloud, Starbuck suggests giving the platform a try.
“A big selling point is the way JumpCloud has been modeled; they are focused on users, not device count,” Starbuck explains. “Other platforms focus on device count. If you’re concerned with multiple devices and hitting those limits, that’s where JumpCloud is always going to be your winner.”
Any last words?
“Overall, JumpCloud has reduced fatigue and friction for my team,” Starbuck says. “We use literally almost every single feature set that JumpCloud has to offer, and I can’t recommend it enough.”
Learn more about JumpCloud
JumpCloud® delivers a unified open directory 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. JumpCloud is IT Simplified.
To see the power of JumpCloud yourself, request a demo or start a 30-day trial today.