04-08-2022 01:22 PM - edited 04-08-2022 01:23 PM
I'm curious how others are dealing with the issue of trying to organize and manage groups across your organization's IT/business systems. I'm working on a plan to do a full company-wide review of all the various types of groups across our system to try and bring some order to the "chaos." Ok, chaos might be a bit of an exaggeration, but there is definitely room for improvement. As we are looking to enhance our security/compliance and automate more and more functions, it becomes increasingly important to know what groups belong to what systems, prevent unnecessary, overlapping, or orphaned groups, and have a clear understanding of who is a part of those groups and why.
For example, within JumpCloud, I use a lot of prefixes when naming things so that I can keep similar groups together, such as software deployment groups, SSO groups, policy groups, patch management groups, department-based device groups, department-based user groups, etc, etc. And all the names try to make it very clear who a group applies to or what its purpose is.
Do you try and keep names consistent across systems or is that not a concern? So for instance "Engineering" in one system should be identical in both naming and membership with "Engineering" in another? How do to manage the creation of new groups? For instance Google Groups... Is that ability controlled by IT or do users have the ability to do so?
I'd enjoy hearing how others have approached this wide-ranging topic within your organizations and if you've found things that worked well or perhaps things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but ended up not panning out with actual use.
04-13-2022 08:21 AM
I was always curious how organizations with multiple groups did this. I have seen a few examples but definitely worth sharing some best practices here.
04-13-2022 03:42 PM
So I just did this a month ago or so, and ran into the same issue of "How the he11 do I organize this to make sense for scalability". I've split this into a few sections, so you can see how I set it up across the board.
User Group
Device Groups
Google Groups
We do manage some groups through JumpCloud, but we have quite a few other groups that aren't managed through JC just because it doesn't make sense to. Anyone in our organization can create groups, since it doesn't cost us money we don't really care, haha. The groups that JumpCloud does manage, we don't add any 'managers' or 'owners' to them so people can't invite members who aren't supposed to be in it!
I hope this helps, it's a pain to structure these for scalability and usability.
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