Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine: Best User Experience

[cfowlerICOM]

name: Casey Fowler

Title: Systems Administrator

Contact information: idahocom.org

Company name:  Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine

Location: Meridian, Idaho

What solution (if any) were you using before JumpCloud? 

Our institution is only 4 years old, so we had the pleasure of JumpCloud being our first solution.

What was the challenge your company was facing that led you to considering JumpCloud?

• ICOM is a serverless and cloud-based campus. We soon found a need to securely manage password sprawl so that our employees and students didn’t have as many passwords to manage as they had apps to access.
• We knew that we needed a solution with low overhead for management and something that played well in a modern non-Windows, non-AD, and serverless environment.
   

What made you choose JumpCloud as the solution to your needs?

• We chose JumpCloud because it was an efficient solution to many of the challenges outlined above(and more). We have a support team of five, so we were attracted to JumpCloud’s wide feature set and low overhead of management. Another huge attraction was the ease of managing RADIUS for our Meraki network.
• Some of the little things included the ease of password reset management for customers. Gone are the days of the helpdesk workload being 65% password resets. Google and Microsoft Cloud Directory integration has helped reduce redundant data entry, which our small team appreciates. 
• We found the support team to be amazing and efficient when we had questions, and the knowledge base articles have been far and away clearer and more effective than much of the competition.
   
  
  

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.?

• ICOM is Idaho’s first and only medical school. We’re also an Apple Distinguished School, with 700 students and a little over 100 employees.
• All our students are issued iPad Pro’s and employees are using MacBooks, iMacs, Studios, Minis, and even a Mac Pro thrown in. The only resource on-prem is a lonely print server and a secure NAS. Everything else is in the cloud.
• I manage our JumpCloud, Cisco Meraki, Jamf Cloud, Google Workspace, Office 365, Webex, Verkada, and many other applications for security and productivity.
• All computer access is managed by JumpCloud, as is Radius for our WiFi. All of the services mentioned above are SSO apps hosted in JumpCloud.

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!

• JumpCloud PowerShell Module has been an absolute monster of a tool with helping me manage and import users/groups in-bulk. Adding groups of users from one account to another, generating specific reports,
• We’ve integrated our Google and M365 directory to help in the onboarding and provisioning of new employees and students. Resource access is managed via User Management has been incredibly helpful for the times we need to provide specific and secure access to non-affiliate preceptors.
• We are in the process of expanding our RADIUS reply attributes to better secure our wireless network by being able to direct certain users to specific VLANs based on their group membership.
• With a heavy reliance on cloud and web apps, we decided to use the JumpCloud User Portal as a centralized ‘Bookmarks and More’. Along with all the SSO apps managed by JC, we added all other relevant web app URLs so that users had a single webpage that contained any and all resources they needed to be productive.

 
What are some results you’ve seen since implementing JumpCloud? What do you hope to achieve

• Our users have loved the ease of password management and not having to wait on IT to reset their passwords.
• We’ve gotten positive feedback on the User Portal as well that it is incredibly useful for new students and employees as they familiarize themselves with resource access.
• The features and Powershell module has saved IT countless hours of data entry.
• Our goal for our users is to facilitate a seamless flow of information access. The goal for our IT department is to empower users to leverage the modern technology we are providing. We believe the easier the tech is to access, the more likely a user becomes an advocate.