Name: Nathan Vergin
Title: Director of IT
Contact information: (in profile)
Company name: AkitaBox
Location: We are headquartered in Madison, WI but have employees all across the country.
What solution (if any) were you using before JumpCloud?
Nothing - all our workstations (Windows, Mac, and Linux) were standalone and were using local user accounts. We leveraged a variety of SaaS business systems such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Zoom, LastPass, Atlassian, etc… but there was nothing from an IT perspective pulling it all together or managing access to those systems.
What was the challenge your company was facing that led you to consider JumpCloud?
When I started at AkitaBox nearly 4 years ago, there was no centralized internal IT infrastructure in place. There were no standard naming conventions other than for the company email address, few policies were in place around passwords/security, and pretty much everything was done in an ad-hoc method as the mindset was more to simply “make it work” rather than to make it “work right” from a centralized, managed IT perspective.
My first project was to bring order to that chaos. JumpCloud was the first new system that I brought on board in order to establish a centralized directory to manage our computer and user accounts. After that first huge win, I kept the momentum going by systematically implementing additional features and capabilities offered by the platform. JumpCloud has continued to play a pivotal role in helping to secure, streamline, and transform the business in a wide variety of ways and as new features are introduced, we continue to implement them bringing further consolidation and standardization to our business. To this day, when I am going through our IT onboarding orientation with new employees, I describe JumpCloud as the backbone of not only our IT infrastructure but by extension, the business itself.
What made you choose JumpCloud as the solution to your needs?
At the time we had an office that roughly 95% of our employees worked out of the majority of the time. Full-time remote work was not a huge factor at that point but mobility was as there was a need for regular travel. So from the get-go, we have been a cloud-first organization with no on-prem infrastructure outside of the local network and a printer. As such, we needed a directory solution that was not only cloud-based but one that would seamlessly support all 3 major operating systems. Something that would allow mobility and an ability to easily scale and adapt to our business needs and operational requirements as we continued to grow. I also wanted to find a solution from a company that was still young and agile enough that rapid innovation in the platform was still taking place and that real-world user feedback and feature requests would actually help shape the product. JumpCloud was the only product that not only met those needs but went above and beyond them.
Could you tell us about your company’s environment? How many users? What resources do you manage, including devices + cloud/on-prem infrastructure + applications, etc.?
We currently have roughly 50 employees. Over the past 4 years, we have seamlessly transitioned from an office-based mobile environment to being 100% remote literally overnight early on in the pandemic. Recently we have transitioned into a hybrid environment with remote-first being the standard but with an office that can be used as desired. Approximately one-third of our company now works out of state, most of which have never been to our physical office. We recently transitioned most of our workforce to MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. We still have a subset of users who require Windows systems for specific AutoDesk products and also have a Linux user.
Please also list any integrations, features, commands, policies, and anything else you’re using. Now’s your chance to tell us how awesome your project is and why it should win!
What are some results you’ve seen since implementing JumpCloud? What do you hope to achieve?