I am very excited to announce that Dynamic Groups is now General Availability (GA) on the JumpCloud platform. This new capability was an evolution beyond what we called User Group Suggestions where IT admins could build attribute rules to “suggest” membership changes for User Groups to review before the change took place. It was a natural progression to extend group membership capabilities to be fully automatable along with enabling Device Groups to operate the same way.
What is Dynamic Groups
Dynamic Groups allow our Direct and MSP customers to automate and customize group (users and devices) membership based upon attribute rules that they can configure to fit their specific needs. This will result in significant time savings for admins and allow for them to drive more towards a manage by exception model. Group membership plays a significant role in how our admins bind users to resources, set policies on devices, provision services, etc. By automating this process, we are dramatically improving the overall efficiency of our admins daily tasks all while reducing potentially costly errors.
Read my Dynamic Groups Preview article to learn how Dynamic Groups came about and the changes that took place from User Group Suggestions to what we have today.
Key Capabilities
- Fully Automated Dynamic Groups - Ability to completely automate group membership changes across both users and devices.
- Optional “Review Required” - Enable admins to require a review before group membership changes and replaces our “suggestions” approach with user groups.
- Improved “Exemptions” Experience - Allow exceptions to the rules for all rules based groups. This allows admins to account for those exceptions and keep the user or device from changing membership regardless of the rules configured.
- User State Attribute - Enable the admin to set a rule around user state (activated, pending, suspended).
- Group Membership Preview - Provide an easy way to see potential membership changes based upon the rules configured prior to saving the group.
- Default Groups - For new customers, the account will come with dynamic default groups for all users, all devices and devices by os family already set up with rules in place which the admin can change. For existing customers, we left the existing default groups as is but show how to transition them to a Dynamic Group.
- Consistent Experience Across Users and Devices - The Dynamic Groups experience is consistently made across both user and device groups. This will make it easier for the admin to navigate and manage.
Key Benefits
- Decreased IT Administration - IT admins can “fire and forget” user and device group membership based upon configurable rules to meet their needs. This results in furthering their journey towards a manage by exception approach.
- Minimized Security Risks - IT admins can take a JIT approach towards resource access thus limiting users to only be accessing the resources as needed.
- Cost Reduction - Better control over license provisioning based upon group membership will reduce unused or underused licenses.
- Improved Policy Compliance - Device policies can easily be applied to devices based upon their group membership anytime during their lifecycle management. This can happen automatically based upon device group changes.
- Improved JumpCloud Open Directory Platform Experience - Provide a curated set of tools or processes that are easily consumed by IT admins to increase their productivity, device and security posture.
Wrap Up
Dynamic Groups is just a first step in our overall Orchestration strategy at JumpCloud. It is a foundational piece of much more to come. We are going to continue to develop more capabilities around group membership automation and start building more pieces that will be focused on other orchestration and making customer organizations more efficient and secure. Stay tuned!!!
Additional Resources
If you are looking for more details, there is a lot of good content around Dynamic Groups both within the JumpCloud Help Center as well as the JumpCloud Community.
Support Articles:
Community Posts:
