Webspec

[steven]

Name: Steven Hodges
Title: Systems Administrator
Contact Information: See Profile
Company Name: Webspec
Location: Urbandale, IA

• What solution (if any) were you using before JumpCloud?
  • We were using a self-hosted service called FreeIPA. We used it to sync linux accounts across our roughly 100 servers.
• What was the challenge your company was facing that led you to considering JumpCloud?
  
  • The main issue was that FreeIPA is semi-locked down to a RHEL based OS. They have some support for Debian, but it's not great. With CentOS 7 going EOL in 2024, and CentOS 8 going EOL in 2021 & moving to CentOS Stream; we decided it was time to look into other solutions for account management.
  • The other main issue was that with roughly 65 employees, it was incredibly hard for me to manage accounts across various resources & accounts.
• What made you choose JumpCloud as the solution to your needs?
  • One thing I value highly when choosing new vendors is that we'll be treated like humans, instead of like a checkbook. It ultimately came down to Okta (shocking, I know) and JumpCloud. I had a better experience with the JC sales people than I did Okta. The second thing is (of course) pricing. If I remember correctly, for our use case, the pricing between Okta and JumpCloud was negligible, but Okta had "marketing" names for their products, instead of just what they were like JumpCloud. So I had a hard time ensuring I was choosing the right "add ons".
  • In the end, JumpCloud won and I haven't looked back since.
• 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.? 
  • Webspec has roughly 65 employees, all of which are in JumpCloud. Most of our employees have one computer, with a few of us having two (or in my case three, don't ask lol), that are managed in JumpCloud.
  • Additionally, we have roughly 120 servers that we also add in JumpCloud, to manage linux users for our development staff. All but 2 of them are cloud hosted.
  • All of our servers, with the exception of a few operations specific servers, have either WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, or a custom PHP site hosted on them. As a web & app development and marketing agency, we host and maintain our clients sites for them.
  • All of our servers are running some version of Ubuntu or CentOS 7.
  • Our computers are either Windows or MacOS, we haven't had any employees request to use Linux yet.
• 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!
  • We heavily rely on User & Device groups to maintain access to various SSO apps and devices. I actually wrote a post about how we use groups in detail!
  • We're utilizing the LDAP SAMBA integration to allow our developers to mount their own development servers to their computers, for ease of editing / uploading files.
  • We have two RADIUS instances created, one that manages the WiFi in our office, the other is being used to manage authentication to our VPN.
  • Of course we have a handful of SSO apps, five of which have a Conditional Policy that require MFA.
  • We're utilizing OS Patch Management and absolutely LOVING it. I learned pretty quickly that some of our staff don't bother doing updates... we even had one MacBook Pro that was 2 major versions behind...
  • The coolest thing (in my opinion) that we use, is the JumpCloud API! We're using it heavily to help maintain our internal HR & Asset Management system. I also wrote a good size post about the details of how we're using the JumpCloud API!
  • I'm in love with the commands feature too, but other than some random commands, we're not utilizing it heavily. One of my favorite things, is to change the background image to a picture of me with some friends occasionally. 🙈
• What are some results you’ve seen since implementing JumpCloud? What do you hope to achieve?
  • The biggest improvement we've seen is the amount of hours it takes to onboard new employees. A few clicks here and there and all but 3 company accounts are created and ready to go for new employees. The other 3 accounts will soon be created, once I write a custom API connector to manage that! (Unfortunately one of them don't support SSO, and the other two require us to pay more for it.)
    
  • A month or so ago, our CEO had to ssh into one of our servers for the first time since we started using JumpCloud, and was blown away at how he just had to upload his SSH key to his account, and within minutes had his account ready to go on the server to restart the database service.