12.15.23 - IT Hour Transcript | End of Year Wrap: Executive Q&A

[urvashi]

Key Takeaways

• The IT hour on December 15th marked the last session of the year, offering a chance to reflect on the developments and challenges faced in 2023.

• 2023 was noted as a year with significant global challenges, including wars and a divisive political climate, coupled with economic and IT security issues impacting businesses.

• Despite challenges, 2023 was also a year of remarkable global innovation and increased global connectivity, with technology playing a central role in business and commerce.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) was highlighted as a key topic in 2023, offering both opportunities and challenges with the potential to enhance human capabilities in various sectors.

• Security remained a top priority, with emphasis on the importance of adaptability, resilience, and IT-related security, including the development of secure and user-friendly identity solutions like JumpCloud Go.

• For 2024, the focus is on building safer and more user-friendly identities, enhancing device security, and increasing automation in IT processes.

• To gain more insights and details about the discussed topics, including the future of IT security and the role of AI in shaping business strategies, be sure to check out the full episode of the IT Hour here.

Introduction

In this engaging episode of IT Hour on December 15th, we join Becky Scott, Head of Community at JumpCloud, and Rajat Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud, for a year-end discussion reflecting on the pivotal moments of 2023 and looking ahead to the opportunities and challenges of 2024. 

The conversation delves into various topics, including the global and business challenges faced over the past year, the rise of AI, the ongoing importance of security and identity management in IT, and strategic priorities for the upcoming year. 

This session, marking the last IT Hour of the year, provides valuable insights and offers a comprehensive overview of the current state and future directions of Identity and Security.

Full Video + Overview

The IT Hour | End of Year Wrap: Executive Q&A 12.15.23

Speakers

Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud

Becky Scott, Head of Technical Community, JumpCloud

Urvashi H.V., Technical Community Champion, JumpCloud

Transcript

Introduction to IT Hour and CEO Rajat Bhargava

Becky Scott:

Be Friday. It's Friday, December 15th, and the last IT Hour of the year. Can you believe it’s that time? All right, everyone, thanks for joining us today. We are very excited to have our CEO Raj back with us again. Always excited to have you here. Welcome everyone. If you're new and haven't been here before, we're glad to have you. 

Hi everyone, I'm Becky Scott, Head of Community and host of the IT Hour, and Urvashi is my co-host. She's our technical champion. And I think most of you know Raj, but if you don't, Raj is our CEO, and he is joining us today, and we've got lots of great things to talk about. We're going to talk a little bit about what has been happening in 2023 and a little bit about 2024 maybe. We're going to wait and see if Raj has anything to share there. Raj, thank you for joining us. We know you've been busy as of late.

Rajat Bhargava:

Thanks for having me. Yes. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be back with everybody.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, end of year stuff. Keeping you busy?

Rajat Bhargava:

Yes, of course. And actually planning for next year, so that's keeping all of us busy, right? Making sure that we're on top of the game for next year as well.

Reflection on 2023: A Year of Ups and Downs

Becky Scott:

Absolutely. Well, we are going to talk a little bit about another year in the books. So we had you on right at the beginning of the year, kind of talking about 2022 and then looking ahead to 2023. So how are you feeling looking back on 2023 right now?

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, I dunno. I kind of think 2023 has been kind of a crazy year. So a lot of ups, a lot of downs. I kind of take stock of maybe macro and big picture, and unfortunately, we've got, I'll start with the stuff that's tough, right? 

We've got two wars now going on in the world, which definitely sucks a lot. So that's not great. That's hard for everybody, I think, across the board, a politically divisive environment. So that's been challenging kind of everywhere, you kind of see it, not just frankly in the US. I've been traveling around the world. I traveled quite a bit this year around the world, and unfortunately, it's divisive everywhere, which is really too bad. You've got a macroeconomic environment that is still really challenging for a lot of people. So that's been difficult. And I think closer to home maybe security issues just continue to be a thing for IT organizations everywhere.

So I think those are all some of the things that I would say have been challenging. On the flip side, I think there's been a lot of great stuff too. You look at the amount of innovation coming out from around the globe, around the world, everywhere. I've been in tons of countries this year, and it is amazing to see so much innovation going on. So many cool products, companies, innovative people, wonderful people to go meet all across the world. 

I do think that's another thing that feels is happening is that we are moving to a much more global economy. And I would say people are sort of connecting with a lot of folks all around the globe, but I think the world's shrinking, and I think that's a really wonderful thing too. So I think that's not something that was happening 10 years ago, and we just continue to shrink the world.

And we work with, even at JumpCloud, we work with a lot of people in a lot of different countries, not only as customers. We have customers in 160 countries, which is mind-boggling to me. But we also have people, our JumpCloudians in about 15-20 countries around the globe. So that's really neat. I love seeing that. I love meeting with lots of different people, and I think that's been a huge thing this past year. 

And I think AI is probably sort of the topic of the year, which has been hugely interesting. I think pros and cons from a lot of different perspectives and vantage points. But I think hopefully we're going to be able to have AI really help us do what we are great at as humans, and it's going to give us leverage and let us focus on things that are far more interesting and far more challenging and far more fun, hopefully.

So I think that's exciting. I would say IT, in general, is becoming more and more of a foundation. I think technology is more of a foundation in organizations today. I love that. I love that what we all do for a living is becoming more and more important, more central to how organizations operate, how business and commerce is done. 

So I don't know, it's been a really interesting year and in a lot of ways, a lot of learning, a lot of good stuff, a lot of challenging stuff around the world, but I think you have to say it was a very, very interesting year for sure.

Becky Scott:

But that's one of the old curses. May you live in interesting times. 

Rajat Bhargava:

We do. We do. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that we really need to pay attention to. Speed of business. I was going to talk a little bit about that a little later, but speed of business, complexity of business, complexity of everything is going up. So yeah, not easy, but definitely interesting.

Adaptability and Resilience Heading into 2024

Becky Scott:

Yeah, definitely. So now that we've kind of looked a little bit back at 2023, what lessons are you taking from that into 2024?

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, I think globally, I would say adaptability and resilience are two things that really come to mind for me. I'd say security is probably another one. And I think security in a lot of ways, not just physical security, but of course, the security that we all work on, which is much more IT-related security. 

But I think we have to be much more adaptable. I think we have to be much more resilient. I think the world is very, very unpredictable now. And I think ironically the thing that we should predict is the unpredictability. And we need to be really prepared for things that can go awry, can change on us. And I think just having the mental fortitude on that and just being resilient, being adaptable, making sure that you're able to withstand all of those different changes and adjustments and challenges all around the world.

I mean, it's not easy, and it's not easy for the people, the community that we're a part of. I mean, you've got security issues, you've got lots of change, you've got lots of economic change. So how do you prepare, how do you deal with that? How do you adapt to that? 

To me, that's one of the biggest lessons coming out of this past year is that we really do need to be thinking about those things. And it's not easy. I think the mental toll it can take is huge, but I think if you can get yourself into the right headspace to be able to adapt and be resilient, then I think you're going to really succeed.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, I know we've had some webinars on taking care of yourself and taking time, but we've also had IT Hour topics around how to have a business continuity plan and how to prepare your business for things that happen, and being more prepared will just take away some of that stress. It doesn't take away all of it, but there are things you can do to help mitigate some of those things. 

And that kind of leads into security because we've had lots of talks about that. It's been big in the news. There's been a lot of high-profile breaches. It can be a really complicated and challenging issue. So I know you have a lot of thoughts on that. We've talked a lot within the company about security because we deal with people's really sensitive info. So let's talk a little bit about security and some of our lessons learned and where we're headed in that realm.

JumpCloud’s Ethos and Incident Response

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, absolutely. And obviously transparently, we had our own security incident earlier this year, which impacted a very small number of customers, less than five customers, less than 10 devices. So I think we've learned a lot from that. 

I would say it really matters, the ethos of the company. And we have an ethos that's very communicative, transparent, open, fast, and I think we really sort of put those things into action. And we were moving incredibly fast. We were dealing with the issue very, very quickly, but we were also very open as soon as we thought we could reasonably communicate it to customers, we did. And I would say that was in hours and we were open and transparent, and then we went through a full analysis of it, which was really important. 

But I would say it goes back to ethos. If you have an ethos which is built on transparency, openness, speed, those are things that are really, really important.

And unfortunately, I think when you look around the world today, these high profile breaches, that's not what we're seeing. And it's really, really disappointing. I mean, these are very, very big organizations that aren't being open, that aren't being transparent, that aren't doing it very quickly. And I think that's bad for all of us. I mean, it's bad for their customers. It's bad for the community. And ultimately, I think there's going to be a change. I mean, now the SEC is mandating disclosure of issues, security issues and breaches and things like that. So I think if we as a community don't behave properly, the regulators and the government folks will help mandate that. And so that'll correct some of the problem. But I think that's been a big lesson for us this past year. 

And I would say I'm really, really proud of the culture that we built and the ethos that we have inside of our company. And I think they were put to the test earlier this year, and I feel really good about how our team responded and how they handled themselves. And it was not an easy time, not easy situation, but I would put our team up against anything else that's going on out there today. And I think we've behaved in a completely different way that I feel really great about.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. I think all we can do is just try to be as prepared as we can. And we talked a little bit in our prep session about the attack vector being identities, so that's a really important piece of what we're doing with JumpCloud Go and everything. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

The Role of Identity in Security

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, and I should have sort of mentioned that, and maybe the way to think about this is first thing is preparation, right? And we've talked about a lot of the challenges. I think preparation solves a lot of challenges upfront, and it takes time. It's not easy. It's the stuff that we all like to skip over because we like to get to the fun stuff, which is whatever, just doing stuff. 

But at the end of the day, preparation really matters, and that's taking stock of where you are at from a security perspective, what you think the issues are, how you're going to level that up and make a difference. So that sort of thing. One is preparation. Thing two is the action, making sure that you've got systems in place. And you're right. I think identity is one of the most important attack vectors if not the most important attack vector these days.

If you compromise somebody's identity, the right identity, you're basically through all of the issues you can get around all the security tools. And unfortunately, that's what's happening. We’re seeing that happen countless times. And this is where we've really innovated quite a bit now. 

First of all, we're trying to make sure that everybody's tenants are highly secure. So you've seen changes even recently where we are making sure that the admin accounts are backed by MFA, basically they're being mandated - long, strong passwords. We're continuing to make all kinds of innovations on ensuring that things that need to be set up aren't set up until they need to be when somebody uses them. So there aren't remnants of things laying around that somebody could use as an attack vector. 

We're getting far more sophisticated on how to make sure that we're protecting everybody's tenant. 

Securing Identity with JumpCloud Go

But I would say one of the most important innovations that we came out with this past year is JumpCloud Go, and everybody should think of it as a very, very highly secure, basically three-factor type solution that’s passwordless.

So at the end of the day, I think it's easier for end users to use, and I think it's much more secure. So that, to us, is one of the foundations or the cornerstones of what we're going to do moving forward because ultimately, we believe JumpCloud Go, hopefully, can be one of the most effective, easiest to use, and safest identities that people can rely on. So that is our vision with that, and we're going to double down, triple down on that to make sure that all these problems like session hijacking and the customer support emails getting compromised or accounts getting compromised and certificates being stolen, things like that. Those are all things that we can ultimately prevent. If something like that happens, we can still make sure that an identity isn't compromised. 

So there's a tremendous amount of work going on in that, but I would say that is to us, one of the most important things, and I'd say every JumpCloud organization should turn on JumpCloud Go and make sure they start using it because it's super powerful.

Addressing End-User Security Concerns

Becky Scott:

We have a lot of discussions here and in the Slack lounge about MFA fatigue too. And really, your end users are the first line of attack a lot, and they're usually your hardest to not necessarily control, but control for because they're the ones that just can easily click on something and not pay close attention. 

Yeah, Dean is saying this in the chat, humans are the weakest link in any security system, and we do mention that quite frequently. It's like they're the ones that you have to train a lot more and control four because they,

Rajat Bhargava:

And this is where I get excited about JumpCloud Go, right? I mean, yes, we are the weakest link, but if we can wrap an easier-to-use identity that's safer, more secure because it's sort of got three factors embedded into it, then I think hopefully we can get to that point where we're reducing ourselves as the weakest link, or maybe we still will be, but the chances that it makes a negative impact go down. 

So to us, it's been a huge challenge. I firmly believe building the safest, easiest use identity is a highly valuable proposition. It's something that would make a big difference for a lot of folks out there. And to the extent that we can do that in a way that is really super easy for people to use, that would be great.

Competitive Landscape in Security

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of security, let's talk a little bit about the competitive landscape because we talked about there being a lot of high-profile breaches, but from our perspective, let's talk a little bit about the competitive landscape and what the outlook is there.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, look, I think the competitive landscape right now is super interesting. I think it's never been as active as I've seen in the history of JumpCloud. So we've got organizations that are really struggling, competitively struggling because they have made mistakes around security. I think we're seeing some companies that have decided that they would like to sell themselves, and so they're sort of saying, hey, we need to be paired up with somebody else to work better. 

We've seen a company recently, a very big company that's going to divest itself from its parent that's going to create tons of change for thousands and thousands of customers. So you've got a really interesting landscape, and I would say there's sort of two centers for us at JumpCloud of basically the competitive landscape. One is basically on the identity side and the other is on the device side.

And we generally see those as separate competitive vectors, if you will. But the interesting part about what we've built at JumpCloud is that we've tried to bring both device and identity together, and ultimately we believe that's the future. And I think it's sort of playing out that that is going to be the future. Having that sort of third factor of the device and securing that device and the device is sort of the gateway to accessing everything. If you can make that sort of frictionless easy to use for end users and you've made it much more secure, I think that is the sort of winner in the market. 

So I feel really good where we're sitting competitively, and I think the market is super fascinating and interesting, and I would encourage every organization, whatever tools they're using, to make sure that they're really understanding where people are headed, what their organization's structure is, whether they're looking to sell themselves, whether they're being divested, whether they've got security issues or whatever's going on. I think it's important to really understand that and have those conversations. 

And look, I think the good part is IT organizations and MSPs and Partners they're becoming more discerning every single day. How do I make sure I make the right choices for my internal organization or my customers? And I think that's great. That's good for the market. It's good for everybody that people are being incredibly discerning about who they partner with, who they work with. Yeah.

Identity Transformation and Cloud Migration over the Years

Becky Scott:

Absolutely. When we had you on earlier this year, we talked a lot about identity transformation, and we've kind of sprinkled it a little bit here and there, but has anything changed since January in identity transformation? And maybe you could update us on that.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, I think from my perspective, I see it accelerating, actually. So I have talked to more and more customers that are on legacy Active Directory, and they realize we've got to figure out how do we get off? How do we move to the Cloud, how do we shift, how do we modernize AD, if you will? 

And for some people, that may mean keeping AD, but wrapping it around with JumpCloud or something else that helps them get to the cloud. For other people, it's going to be just replacing Active Directory. I mean, we're now replacing Active Directory at pretty sizable organizations on a regular basis. And that is a transformation. It is something that people have had in place for a long time. So the opportunity to change it or the challenges of changing it aren't easy. But I think most people realize that the future is not with on-prem identity.

And the real challenge is how can they go from where they're at to where they know they need to go? And that's what we're trying to help a tremendous amount. But I would say the biggest change is I see it accelerating almost every conversation now where AD exists, we're having a conversation about how do you modernize it? And that is a standard conversation now. Whereas a few years ago, I would say that was not a standard conversation; it was only the really forward-thinking organizations were really sort of down that path. 

But today, I think almost every organization realizes that the inevitable is coming. We're going to be moving to the cloud, we've got to figure out how we shift out from this on-prem solution into something that's much more modern and hopefully far easier to use and far more secure.

Becky Scott:

That's great. I see Ricky saying in the chat, loving the Favorites rollout, so looks like he's excited. Yeah.

Rajat Bhargava:

I think he must've been referring to the UI enhancements that Jake was talking about earlier. Is that right?

Becky Scott:

Yeah, exactly.

2024: Opportunities in Technology and Security

Becky Scott:

Yeah. So what opportunities do you see as we head into 2024?

Rajat Bhargava:

I mean, look, I think the opportunities, I'll take it from two different directions. One is the opportunity for all of us as a community, and I think the opportunity absolutely is to drive more innovation into our organization. 

So technology is becoming more and more important, and providing access safely, securely to that technology is becoming far more critical. And so if you can do that, and you can do that really well for your organization, the chances are that your organization is going to succeed. It's going to be able to take advantage of the best technology out there, and hopefully, that's going to translate into a better-performing organization. 

So to me, that opportunity is bigger, more impactful than ever. Obviously, people are going to want to take advantage of AI, they're going to want to take advantage of all these amazing solutions that are coming out and innovations that are coming out.

And so if you can do that safely, securely, easily, that's going to be pretty important. So I'd say that's sort of the macro level or this community level opportunity that I see. And I think from a JumpCloud perspective, I think we can really help, right? This is an important thing. We believe that our open directory platform should be the foundational platform for organizations. It should be the platform that ultimately securely and frictionlessly connects people to whatever they need. 

Ultimately, if we're able to do that, people can be productive with technology, they can get more work done, they can do it easier, safer, and help their organization succeed. So I feel like the opportunity for us is sort of as best as we can see. We're trying to solve a very core foundational problem in this sort of space. And that's all I think you can ask for.

JumpCloud’s Priorities for the New Year

Becky Scott:

That's great. So with that, seeing those opportunities, what are your priorities headed into the new year right now?

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, I think, look, we've sort of talked about it maybe a little bit more vaguely, but I think there's probably two or three different core things that we're focused on. One is I do want to build the safest, easiest-to-use identity on the planet. And given all the issues in the competitive landscape and what's going on in the market, I think that's a very, very big opportunity and an important one for us to focus on. So we're going to put a lot of time and attention into that. 

And I do believe JumpCloud Go is sort of the centerpiece and the core foundation for that. So you'll continue to see a lot of innovation from us this coming year in that area, and we're pretty excited about that. I also think that what we talked about earlier, devices are incredibly important, and they're the gateway.

They're the mechanism that we all use to go do the work that we need to do. Making sure that that device is as safe, secure, and configured properly. That's all super critical. And so we're going to spend a lot more time making sure that we give people more control and we integrate that more deeply into the identity process than it's today. 

So I think those are sort of two, three major things. I think we're also going to continue to work on how we make this as easy and as automated as possible for organizations and for IT organizations. We want to make sure that the complexity that people have to endure these days of how do you provision, how do you de-provision, make sure things are secure, how do you find anomalies? 

All of these issues, we just need to continue to make as easy as possible. So that sort of automation of, let's say, lifecycle access, control, and security is supercritical, and we're going to spend a lot of time there. So I think those three areas are pretty good in terms of thinking about where we are going to spend our time this coming year and what are some of the innovations that we think we're going to drive? They're going to center in those three categories, I think.

Becky Scott:

So knowing the opportunities you see and the priorities, what are you most excited about going into 2024?

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, I think big picture that what I'm most excited about is that I think our platform continues to be sort of the centerpiece for organizations, and we have a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility to make sure that we're supporting our community and making sure that they can go do what they need to do, which is make sure that their organizations run really, really smoothly, so safely, securely, giving people access, doing that as easily as possible. So I think when you break that down, the things that get me excited are we're going to spend a lot more time on JumpCloud Go. 

So that's going to be huge, right? We're going to make sure that we can build the safest, easy-to-use identity that we can possibly build. So that's going to be important. We're going to make sure that device is really secure, performant, able to be completely controlled, to make sure that people can get access to what they need to get access to, but they can do it in a safe manner.

So the integration of device and identity is going to accelerate from our perspective. And then I would say we're super excited about driving more into conditional access policies, more into automation, dynamic groups is a great area that I think I'm hoping that everybody else is using and using quite a bit. You'll see a lot of innovation there so that we can continue to offload work from our community onto the machines. So I think there's a lot of stuff to be excited about. 

I don't know the exact number, but I think we put out 200 releases or something like that this year. My guess is that we'll put out the same 200, 300 releases next year of different features and innovations and things like that. So we've got a lot of work to do, and I think we can drive a lot of value for the community, and that's super important. That's probably the foundational thing that I'm excited about, is that I think we can continue to innovate and help people.

Engagement and Roadmap for Upcoming Year

Becky Scott:

No pressure for you PMs that are listening.

Rajat Bhargava:

Or the engineering teams that do it, and the teams and the tech writing teams that help do that, and our education team who tries to communicate all that stuff. And then obviously making sure that all of our customers and community knows about all the stuff that we're building too, right? 

That's also always a challenge because everybody's busy and making sure that they're aware of all these amazing innovations is not the easiest thing in the world.

Becky Scott:

Either. Oh yeah. And our designers and so many, yeah.

Rajat Bhargava:

Designers, absolutely. I mean, it takes a village, right?

Urvashi H.V.:

It is 365 days, but only 200 releases, so I think it's a doable target.

Becky Scott:

There you go. 

Rajat Bhargava:

We can ask the team if they can try and do a release a day, 365.

Urvashi H.V.:

Am I going to have to hide in a bunker when you make that announcement?

Becky Scott:

I think what has been great about all of our product teams is that they have been really wonderful about coming on the IT hour and talking about new releases, new features, and things like that, and answering a ton of questions for our viewers on the IT Hour. So that has been a really great partnership.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And look, I think the opportunity here, I think we started this conversation we're living in interesting times, and I think we've been incredibly fortunate at JumpCloud that we're focused on an area that is so vibrant, active, important, complex, all of those things combined. And it takes a tremendous amount of work and effort to try and figure out what are the things to do? What are the most impactful things to do? How can we make sure that when we deliver those things, they're done well? And we don't always get that, but we try pretty hard. 

So, in general, I'd say across the company, I think we've got a company that deeply cares about helping our customers, helping the community, and then trying to do the best that we can. And sometimes we get there, sometimes we don't. But you continue trying to improve every day. 

Becky Scott:

So the last thing is about next year. Do you have any sneak peeks into what's coming in Q1? 

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, I've kind of given you a lot of the sneak peeks, but I'm going to wait until the PMs, we do a quarterly roadmap webinar, which I think is wonderful, and I'm super proud of the product team for getting on that cadence every quarter and sharing what we're working on and why we're working on it and getting feedback. And I know those are incredibly vibrant conversations. 

So I know that the number of questions that come up in those conversations is pretty astronomical, and it sparks a whole bunch of discussion, and it sparks frankly, a whole bunch of conversation internally too, because we take all that feedback, and then we go back and say, okay, are we making all the right choices? Do we need to adjust anything? All of those are really important, but I think we're a few weeks away, whatever, a month away from having that webinar. So I'm going to not steal the team’s thunder. 

But I think hopefully we've given everybody the areas of focus or areas of emphasis if you will, that we're really interested in spending a lot of time on, and I think that's going to make a big difference for our community and for customers out there.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. And we always have a follow up to that follow on the IT Hour where we can answer in-depth questions and stuff. So that usually works pretty well. So I have seen some activity in the chat, do we have any questions for Raj? Does anyone want to? You can either ask it in the chat, or we can pull you up on stage, if we dare, and let you ask your questions.

Rajat Bhargava:

Whatever people's minds.

Becky Scott:

Or do we already preemptively answer a lot of those because we had some very thorough answers there from you, so thank you for that.

Rajat Bhargava:

Hopefully, they're helpful.

Exploring the Potential of JumpCloud Go

Urvashi H.V.:

I mean, I'm looking forward to what's happening with JumpCloud Go, because I mean, it's literally perfect. So what are we doing? What more needs to be done? It's solid.

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, there's a lot more to be done, and I think, truthfully, I've said this so many times when I've talked to customers and partners is that, it's very tough to say, right? Life-changing is a very, very high bar. And I won't say that some IT feature or something like that is life-changing because, generally, that's pretty far stretched, but I would tell you that it's pretty darn close. It's pretty amazing. 

And when you open up your computer in the morning and you can just put your finger down or just use your face to jump in, and you can get all the way into all the applications that you're trying to work with, without sort of fumbling around with passwords or MFA tokens and things like that, that is pretty cool. And look, there's a lot more that we want to do around that. 

So I would tell you the couple of categories of things that we're interested in are, one, we want to expand coverage. So we want you to be able to have that experience really from any device possible. So you're going to see that as something that we really deeply care about. 

The second thing is that we are going to continue to innovate. The signals that we receive from the system, from your identity from other places to really help make sure that the level of security continues to go up. We think we absolutely have an amazing opportunity to make JumpCloud Go the safest, pretty darn close to the safest, or if not the safest, identity that we could have on the planet. 

So how can we go do that? That's a very high bar. And the more signals that we can ingest and take care of and use to make sure that that person really is who they say they rightfully have access to these things, and they're then able to access that as frictionally as possible, that's pretty amazing.

And if we can do that from really any device anywhere in the world that they want to work and we can make sure all of that is super safe, that's where we want to head with this. And you'll see that proliferation of different types of devices that we can support, different types of applications and IT resources that we can support, and we can do that really, really well. That's where we'd like to get to. 

So we're already, I think we're the market leader on this particular type of technology, but we need to continue to innovate to be the best in the world, continue to stay the best in the world at it.

Urvashi H.V.:

Can I get a JumpCloud Go version for home use because I would really like to give my mom one fingerprint login for all of her email addresses because she just makes a new one every time she forgets a password. So putting in that feature request.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, and Jeff has it here too. He just wants things that he uses to know that the users are who they are, and that's really the vision of JumpCloud Go is to, and what's interesting is I actually do want it to authenticate a hundred times. I want it to authenticate every 15 or 20 seconds. I just don't want you to be involved in that reauthentication. So it's really important to us that we're constantly checking could there be something wrong? Could there be something changing? Has everything stayed the same or are we really confident that this is a safe use? 

And if you think about some of the session hijacking things that were going on and other ways that people have compromised, that's a really important topic. So you could think about it as almost authentication or continuous auth or whatever we want to call it, but that's a pretty important piece of it that we would like to, we'd like to continue to innovate on. 

So today, JumpCloud Go, I think up to every 30 seconds, or I think it was like 26 seconds. I'm not sure why we picked 26 seconds or something like that, but it's pretty rapid. And if we can do that with many more signals, if we can try and find as many different signals that could detect if there's an issue, that's where we'd like to go.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, I recently switched computers, and I had to use Protect a couple of times to initially show it was me setting up on a new computer. But once I did that, it has been Go all the way, and it has been super easy just letting it pop up and do its thing. I had to do the fingerprint a couple of times, but once I did that, it's just reauthenticating and reauthenticating every time I log back into an application. And it has just been so much easier, so much so that I have to remind myself what my login password is when my computer goes to sleep. It's like I do want to still remember that.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, and important, I think there's this misnomer that we don't ever want to have maybe a password or something that you know. And I don't think we want that. I think we do want, on occasion, for you to basically answer a question that you only uniquely know. And we have different ways to handle that, but I think that's an important security factor. And so yeah, I think, look, there's still a tremendous way to go here. 

I think one of the most important pieces of innovation that we could go work on, and I'm really hopeful that everybody here has tried it. If you haven't tried it, please try it. Please give us feedback. We want to make this, we absolutely want to make this a centerpiece for how your users get access to the things that they need and do it as easy as possible.

Feature Requests and User-Centric Development

Becky Scott:

And Jeff had said as a follow-up it, or IT authenticates, not me. Perfect. Good point. And earlier, Ricky said, “Solid year for JumpCloud, just along for the ride on my side, and always shoot feature requests where possible”. Yes, y'all add in those feature requests because they are critically important in letting us know what you want and what you want to see because that helps us in prioritizing things, knowing what y'all want, what your specific use cases are, and things like that. 

That really helps our product and engineering teams. And he also said “Good focus from the company and team and where things look to be going”. So thank you, Ricky.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, a lot of stuff for us to go do for sure.

Becky Scott:

And then he also said in a follow-up to what Jeff had said, “This is why I love conditional access and getting agents on our BYOD users too and can block access if not on a trusted device. The challenge there is either taking over local user accounts in a soft manner or binding a totally new user for work purposes to the non-company device. Company owned-managed devices are super easy, though.“

Yeah, it's that in-between BYOD group that can be tricky because you don't own the whole thing, but for people that log into their work email or Slack on their phone, you want to have some ability to control it a little bit if someone loses their device or something like that.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a big issue, the sort of BYOD versus corporate-owned, and how do you handle that? That's obviously a huge challenge for us and something that we've been working on, and we're going to continue to work on.

Reflecting on 2023: Favorite Moments and Experiences

Becky Scott:

Yeah. So one question of your favorite moment from 2023 when looking back over the last 12 months?

Rajat Bhargava:

Oh gosh, there's not one favorite moment. I've got so many great moments. I think the ones that really stick out for me is I've traveled a lot this year, and I've traveled really all across the globe. So that's been great. And I think when you go meet with our partners, our customers, our team all around the globe, those are the sort of really special moments. 

I've had a lot of dinners with basically prospects and customers in our community, had some great team dinners, had a lot of meetings all over the world talking about really fun stuff and really challenging stuff. And I think when we feel like we can make a huge difference or when I feel like the JumpCloud team can make a big difference for people, that's pretty satisfying. It's pretty gratifying. And even when people are pushing us to, Hey, we need this, or we need this fixed, or we need these changes made to the product because it's going to help us. 

And sometimes those are challenging conversations. Those are still great conversations. It's stuff where we can learn, we can improve, we can get better, we can bring that feedback back to our team, and we can learn, and we can continue to grow. 

So I think I'd say there's no one special moment. I think the special moments have been all throughout the year, just being with our team, being with the customers, being with partners, and working all together.

Raj’s Dream Feature to Add to the JumpCloud Portfolio

Becky Scott:

Jeff is saying, “Raj, if you had one fictional feature to add to JumpCloud portfolio, what would it be?” Teleporting!

Rajat Bhargava:

I think Jeff is being very clever. He wants me to give away some of the roadmap. No, I kid Jeff. I think one of the ones that I'm super excited about, and we talked a little bit about it earlier, is some of the automation. So we spend a lot of time on JumpCloud Go. Obviously, everybody knows that that's super important and valuable. 

But I think one of the things that I'm super interested in and what I'm seeing when I talk to a lot of customers and partners and the community out there is that they really want to see the full user lifecycle automation, far deeper than I think most software companies or vendors have considered. So I think there's a real opportunity there for us to automate a tremendous amount of the journey for our customers. 

So from the time they onboard as a new employee to making sure that they have the right access all the time to getting them off-boarded and having that whole process as automated as possible, I think there's a lot of work to do there. And having all the reporting, having all of the compliance, all of that built-in, that to me is a really exciting area that we would love to spend a lot of time on because of the amount of impact I think it could make for our customers.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. Urvashi wants all the graphs, pretty graphs, pretty reports. 

Urvashi H.V.:

Not just any graphs, but with the nice colors. 

Rajat Bhargava:

So, yes, I would love to know from Jeff, I would love to know from the community what's the one fictional feature that they would like to see us have. Yeah, reports for sure. And pretty graphs and all of the stuff. But what else could we do?

Seeking AI Related Features in the Future

Becky Scott:

Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things that people said they wanted to see in features from the survey? There were some new things that we said. What would you want to see if we did these things? Yeah.

Rajat Bhargava:

Well, a couple of new ones that we definitely focused on were some of the AI related things and things. I'm definitely very interested to know what folks are thinking along the AI dimension. So that's something that we've been doing a lot of research on. And if you have not connected with some of our team and are interested in that area, please do let us know. There is a tremendous amount of work going on into how we think we can leverage AI in a way that would be beneficial to the community and customers. So I'd say that's a pretty big area. 

What's interesting is, and it's fascinating, we're incredibly excited about JumpCloud Go and passwordless, but what's interesting is I don't think it tested very well in that survey, so not as many people marked that it was as interesting as they wanted. But to me, that's a little bit of, we need to show people how easy and simple it is to use and the value of it.

And if we can go do that, then I think that'll score a lot better. But this is where I try and tell our team, data is really great, and it's important to get, but it's not the whole story. It doesn't tell you the whole picture. And sometimes you can have data that's not quite reality or the truth or may not be reality or the truth, that's one of those ones in this survey that we did that I would flag as that one requires a lot more understanding or work because I think the value of that capability is super high. And I think it means that we haven't done a good job of sharing what that capability is and why it's so important to everybody.

Becky Scott:

Well, maybe not as widely as we could, because I know every time Scott and Tom have been on here talking about it, they've had a lot of, people have had a lot of really great questions and good reception to what they've said and what they've posted in the community. So I think just figuring out how to get that more broadly promoted is the way I think that that was such a wide survey, and maybe not all of those people have heard some of that yet.

Rajat Bhargava:

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of where you could say, oh, this isn't that interesting. Maybe we shouldn't spend that much time on it. But in reality, I think you're right. The more important thing is that we probably haven't done a really good job of communicating it to everybody. And so that's where data can sometimes tell you things that may not quite be the reality of what they are.

Exploring AI

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. And back to the AI piece, two weeks ago, we had Lindsay and Hugh on, and we did actually talk about AI, some of the things we're doing, and we had several people raise their hands and say that they want to be involved with whatever kind of early access things that we're doing along those lines. So we've got some people interested in that. 

Rajat Bhargava:

I'm hoping we'll have some stuff in the new year for people to look at and play with and give us feedback on.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, we definitely had some people here raise their hands. And by the way, y'all, the offer is still open. We've got that AI channel in the lounge that you are still welcome to go join and raise your hand and say, yeah, I want to be involved in whatever is going to be happening, and we'll get you added to that list. So definitely take advantage of that.

Rajat Bhargava:

Absolutely.

Wrapping Up

Becky Scott:

All right, so we are just about out of time. Just a couple minutes left. So I think we have answered everything, but again, raise your hand real quick if you have one more question. But Raj, thank you again for kind of bookending the year for us.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great.

Becky Scott:

Yeah, absolutely. And we will look forward to seeing y'all in the new year on January 5th. So thank you all very much. We look forward to seeing you again in 2024. So thanks for joining.

Rajat Bhargava:

Happy new year, everybody.

Becky Scott:

Happy holidays, happy New Year, and we will see you again in a few weeks. By, all.

Rajat Bhargava:

Yep. Bye.