Xeneta is an ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and market analytics platform transforming the shipping and logistics industry. Founded in 2012, Xeneta has 230 employees working out of its Oslo, Norway headquarters and in offices in New York and Hamburg, Germany.
Bringing transparency to a historically opaque market
For decades, the ocean and air freight markets have been notoriously opaque, leaving businesses with limited visibility into competitive shipping prices. Global events, such as the 2021 Suez Canal blockage, further complicate the pricing landscape by causing sudden disruptions. These factors make it difficult for businesses to navigate and compare shipping rates effectively.
Xeneta seeks to bring transparency to this market by building a platform that gives businesses the same kinds of comparison tools that consumers have enjoyed for years.
“If you want to fly anywhere, you can go online and use one of the flight aggregators and find how much it costs to fly from A to B and then make an informed decision,” says Zakhar Shapurau, VP of Research and Development at Xeneta. “For businesses shipping goods internationally, like refrigerators, it’s much more complicated. Traditionally, they would need to contact multiple suppliers individually to compare freight rates. There hasn’t been a unified platform to streamline this process — until now.”
Enter Xeneta, which collects, cleanses, and validates freight rates from different buyers & sellers in the market, consolidating it all in one place to help enterprises make smarter freight procurement decisions.
Needing better control of devices & tools as the company started to scale
In July 2015, Shapurau joined Xeneta as a senior software developer; after two other promotions, he assumed his current position as VP of R&D in April 2021.
“When I joined, we were maybe like 30 people and now we are more than 200,” Shapurau says. “As the organization grew, it became more challenging to make sure we had control over which tools people use in the cloud and how they use their laptops. Information security became more and more important over time, too. We work with really big enterprise customers and they care a lot about making sure we’re protecting their data.“
In addition to these concerns, Xeneta also wanted to simplify day-to-day IT management.
“We were hiring a lot of people every month,” Shapurau continues. “You need to onboard them, you need to make sure they get access to the right tools and that their name and email is consistent everywhere. And when people leave, you also need to make sure that they don’t have access to the tools and data that they shouldn’t have access to.”
At the time, the company — which has an environment that’s roughly 50% Mac and 50% PC — didn’t really have a directory service.
“We are really heavy on Microsoft 365,” he explains. “Everyone had a Microsoft account, everyone had a Slack account. But they were not really connected. There wasn’t a good place where you could find people.”
Choosing JumpCloud to strengthen identity management
As the Xeneta team began looking for ways to solve these problems, the IT manager at the time suggested exploring JumpCloud, which he’d used at a previous company.
Liking what they saw, Xeneta rolled out JumpCloud, only utilizing a few features at first.
“We started with JumpCloud as a single sign-on provider and identity management solution,” Shapurau says. “We wanted to create a single place where we could define employees and the tools they should be able to access.”
After enjoying their initial experience with JumpCloud, the Xeneta team started using more and more features, and they continue exploring additional ways to leverage the platform to this day.
Future-proofing IT management & preparing for ISO 27001 certification
From enforcing multi-factor authentication on every user to deploying Cloud RADIUS to authenticate users connecting to internal IT networks, there’s no shortage of ways Xeneta is using JumpCloud to strengthen its security posture.
“We’re now working toward ISO 27001 certification, and JumpCloud helps us cover a lot of ground on the controls we need to implement — like access controls and endpoint security,” Shapurau says. “JumpCloud simplifies the regular activities you have to do as part of ISO. It’s much easier to look in one tool and see who has access to what compared to checking 10 or 20 different things.”
At the same time, JumpCloud has delivered significant efficiency gains to Xeneta’s IT team.
“Access provisioning has gotten so much easier,” he explains. “We used to deal with so many requests from different departments — give me this tool, give me that tool — and typically you’d have to chase down the owner of the tool if you didn’t have admin access. Now, almost everything is through JumpCloud, so you just do a couple of clicks and the person gets access. So, access provisioning tickets are typically resolved within a few minutes, which is very nice.”
Onboarding and offboarding
With JumpCloud, the Xeneta team has been able to streamline both the onboarding and offboarding processes, making life easier for IT while strengthening the company’s security posture.
“Every tool that we have is now connected to JumpCloud,” Shapurau explains. “I can provision a user in one place once they appear in our HR system and configure access to every tool. And when they leave the company, I can quickly disable them and make sure they lose access to everything as well.”
This streamlined onboarding also enhances the new hire experience, increasing the chances employees have favorable first impressions.
“They just open the laptop, login, and immediately have access to all of their tools they need day to day,” Shapurau continues. “They already have onboarding meetings booked on their calendars. It’s quite a nice experience.”
When an employee leaves, the Xeneta team wipes laptops and phones clean from JumpCloud, and the soon-to-be former employee then ships the devices back to headquarters.
“Since there isn’t anything left on the laptop, I know we’re safe in case it gets lost or stolen.”
Mobile device management
Leveraging JumpCloud’s mobile device management capabilities has enabled Xeneta to get control over all of their devices without having to add IT headcount.
“We’re trying to keep our IT organization lean, and this is where JumpCloud helps us a lot,” Shapurau says. “I don’t need to have an additional tool for mobile device management, and I also don’t need to have as many people in IT to handle onboarding and support. JumpCloud has this convenient remote support option that we use quite a lot when we help people who aren’t working out of the same office as our IT people.”
Commands
In 2023, Xeneta started utilizing JumpCloud Commands, which enable IT to remotely execute scripts on fleets of devices.
“We use it, for example, to add anti-virus software to all new laptops,” he continues. “So we’ve set up a command where the anti-virus software gets installed when a new laptop joins our mobile device management system.”
Additionally, Xeneta uses Commands to deploy security-related tools and ensure they remain up to date.
“We are exploring patch management as well.”
Policies
Xeneta is also using JumpCloud Policies, which let IT teams automatically configure operating systems on devices they manage.
“We use them to make sure hard drives are encrypted and computers get their screens locked with a certain time limit when they’re not being used,” Shapurau says. “That helps us cover quite a lot of security aspects that are important for us.”
Over the next six months to a year, the team plans to explore conditional policies to further enhance security.
“For example, we can make sure people can only access our most sensitive tools if they’re on a safe network,” he explains.
User groups
Additionally, the Xeneta team uses JumpCloud Groups to make it easier to grant appropriate access to resources.
“We use user groups to provision access to different SaaS applications,” he continues. “For example, the platform that we sell is built on Amazon Web Services. We have several different accounts for different parts of the platform, and we provision access for software developers to AWS through JumpCloud. We assign people to the correct groups and they get access to the AWS single sign-on portal, and they can only access the tools they need to access from there. It’s quite convenient.”
While Xeneta hasn’t yet started using Dynamic Groups, Shapurau believes it’s only a matter of time before they do.
Exploring even more features
Looking ahead, Xeneta is in the process of rolling out Password Manager — which, in addition to simplifying access for end users, also helps Xeneta save money by consolidating tools further. At the same time, Shapurau and his team are considering how to incorporate zero trust into their environment.
“Over the years, JumpCloud has offered us quite a lot of value,” he says.
That being the case, what advice would Shapurau give to someone considering JumpCloud?
“Try out all the different functionalities during a JumpCloud trial,” he says. “JumpCloud allows companies — especially in the early stage of an information security program — to close a lot of gaps really quickly. I encourage people to explore the solution. Many times they will find that they can do 80% of what’s needed just in JumpCloud alone.”
Based on his experience, Shapurau also encourages peers to dive into the JumpCloud ecosystem sooner than later.
“It’s much easier to start MDM when you’re small than when you have to do it for 200-plus people from scratch,” he says. “Get something like JumpCloud early if you can. It’ll make things way easier down the line.”
Anything else to add?
“I cover a lot of ground with JumpCloud,” Shapurau concludes. “It’s a really good value for the price, and it helps keep our IT support team lean across different geographies.”
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