totality services is an IT managed service provider founded in 2008 that delivers end-to-end IT support services to small- to medium-sized businesses in London. Currently, totality has more than 40 employees, and the company — which is part of the JumpCloud partner network — works with customers across all verticals.
Seeking a more robust mobile device management solution
As a managed service provider, totality is always looking for ways to deliver more robust IT solutions to its clients. According to Charlie Acfield, a technical account director at totality, the company didn’t really have a great solution for managing Macs. totality had been engaging with a popular mobile device management provider for Apple devices to solve this problem, but they couldn’t really agree on a deal.
“The product was great from a management perspective, but they were requiring things from us that just didn’t work practically, and so it was always a bit of a non-starter,” Acfield says.
Though totality had a completely intuitive, logical way to manage Windows machines, Macs always caused headaches.
“We always took a hybrid approach to Macs and it was difficult to manage, difficult to understand, and difficult to deal with on a day-to-day basis for the actual end user and customer,” Acfield explains. “It wasn’t a really fun place to be in.”
Delivering unified device and identity management with JumpCloud
The majority of totality’s customers rely heavily on Windows machines. However, in Acfield’s estimation, any time a customer engages totality and has an environment that includes at least 10% Macs, that’s when problems start.
“We had some new business come in and they were at least 50% Macs,” Acfield says. “They were using Google Workspace, so they didn’t fit in with the 365 stack, and we very much needed something else to manage these machines.”
Rather than relying on a patchwork solution of siloed services and management platforms that didn’t really work well together, Acfield and his team began looking for a solution that delivered identity management and mobile device management across hybrid environments.
“Each of those platforms are all very good at what they do individually, but there was no glue tying anything together,” Acfield explains.
As an IT company that works with a number of different businesses, the totality team found out about JumpCloud from one of its clients. After testing the platform and realizing it was exactly what they needed, the totality team started rolling out JumpCloud for its clients and also deployed it internally.
“If we’re going to be recommending something and putting supporting services in, we need to be confident that it’s the right fit,” Acfield says. “Why would we be suggesting something that we’re not using ourselves?”
Streamlining backend processes and staying on the cutting edge
With JumpCloud in its portfolio, the totality team is confident they have the best solution for managing identity and devices across hybrid environments. Not only does this help them manage their own users internally, it also enables them to give customers more secure IT environments.
Staying on the leading edge
To give clients the best service possible, totality is always on the lookout for the latest innovations and the best tools on the market.
“We try to stay on the forefront,” Acfield says. “We go to a lot of partner events and peer events to try and stay on top of what’s out there.”
In Acfield’s opinion, JumpCloud helps the team meet these goals by enabling them to offer a powerful and flexible identity and mobile device management solution to clients of all sizes.
Billing made easy
While an MSP might be able to get away with a less efficient approach to device and identity management when it’s a smaller shop, that’s just not possible when you’ve scaled up to 200-plus clients — particularly when it comes to ensuring billing is accurate, according to Acfield.
“It’s very important that we have platforms that talk to each other,” Acfield continues. “It’s really a prerequisite for us as an organization to have a tool set that talks to our business management platforms from an access perspective but, more importantly, from a billing perspective. We need to make sure that we are capturing what our clients are using so that we can then bill for that appropriately.”
Thanks to JumpCloud, totality’s billing process is fully automated.
“Without even having to touch anything on a monthly basis, we onboard a new client, join up the dots as we do with the API integrations, and after that it just pulls in how many licenses have been consumed, and we bill it,” he says. “It’s all automated, which is really important for us.”
A platform they can grow alongside
The totality team proactively engages all of its larger clients, conducting security and performance reviews and making suggestions. In some cases, they offer the same services to smaller clients.
“We won’t necessarily create a bespoke roadmap for them as we do for our larger clients, but we do reach out and give them an opportunity to have a call,” Acfield says. “With our larger clients, we have far more structured and formal reviews where we look at their existing stack, what their business plans are and where they want to go, and then figure out the technology we can provide to get them there. And that will invariably involve discussing tools like JumpCloud to see if it’s a good fit, which it often is.”
Around the holidays, Acfield and his team were able to onboard several more JumpCloud customers off the back of these kinds of conversations.
“I think the platform has matured so much that it actually gives us the ability to engage even more clients than it did when we started using it a couple of years ago,” he says. “We’ve been very impressed with JumpCloud’s rate of development over the last 12 to 18 months. We don’t get these empty promises that we get with a lot of other vendors. We’re seeing a really rapid development cycle, with lots of new features coming out very, very regularly.”
If Acfield was having a beer with a fellow MSP professional, what would he say about JumpCloud?
“It’s absolutely worth looking into at the very least, since there’s nothing else that does everything that JumpCloud can do as a single coherent package,” Acfield concludes. “It’s everything you need and ties everything together. We haven’t been able to find anything else like it that exists — let alone comes close.”
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.
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