Company: JumpCloud
Company background:
To meet modern demand for hybrid-remote workplaces, organizations require a tool that centralizes user and device management for virtually all IT resources. This tool has to be cloud-based and able to control, manage, and secure remote users from a single admin portal, and needs to work across a device environment that is a mix of personal and corporate devices that run some combination of macOS, Windows, and Linux devices.
For large companies, there’s often budget and IT teams available to tackle the challenge. But for small and medium-sized companies or enterprises (SMEs), admins often lack support, staff, and investment to connect users - securely - without adding onerous steps for employees.
The JumpCloud Open Directory Platform unifies user identity, access, and device management for remote workers. Its centralized platform includes SSO, MFA, directory services, device management, conditional access policies, UEM, and integration with common SaaS apps for collaboration and HR, to cover the entire employee lifecycle.
JumpCloud secures customers with an easy route to deploy Zero Trust security policies and integrates with virtually all resources including files, applications, networks, systems, servers and more – whether in the cloud, on-premises, or elsewhere – with protocol-based integrations and no on-premises hardware.
The JumpCloud Directory Platform is already deployed in over 180,000 worldwide organizations, including over 1,800 managed service provider (MSP) partners. Its commitment to ease-of-use for both IT administrators and the employees they manage has resulted in rapid product growth, rapid hiring expansion, and rapid customer adoption.
JumpCloud’s feature releases are based on requests from the IT admins who directly manage remote work to ensure that the JumpCloud feature set covers their needs.
What JumpCloud offers:
- Easy user management for partners with zero-touch onboarding and one-click import from HRIS, Google Workspace, M365, and AD, with Multi-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On options
- Device management is easier as policies can be applied to all major OS versions (Windows, macOS, Linux) while Mobile Device Management integration makes it simple to provision devices
- Protocol-driven access to all IT resources - cloud, on-premises or hybrid authentication and authorization through SAML 2.0, LDAP, and RADIUS - simplifies the process for MSPs to manage access control
- Conditional access policy engine - this provides a simple rules-based approach for admins to define policies on how and when users can access assets, applications, and services. Users can only access organization data from trusted devices and networks
- Mobile MFA integrated natively into the platform, in a simple “tap to authenticate” model at no additional cost
- Patch Management to reduce vulnerabilities from known software exploits by giving admins the control over the updates
- Biometric authentication
JumpCloud’s mission is to Make (Remote) Work Happen, a mission that it has been pursuing since its founding in 2012. Recent world events may have forced SMEs to work with a “good enough” remote solution, but JumpCloud’s platform offers a long-term, cost-effective, full-feature, centralized solution that can be managed with ease.
Contact: Becky Scott
Title: Senior Manager, Technical Community
Related URLs:
JumpCloud Community
JumpCloud blog
JumpCloud on Twitter
JumpCloud on LinkedIn
JumpCloud on YouTube
JumpCloud’s IT Admin Community Network
The IT Hour
JumpCloud Lounge
JumpCloud resource hub
Kudos Category: Rookie of the Year
1. Describe your company and your organization.
JumpCloud is an open directory platform that enables companies to unify user identity, access, and device management for remote workers. We Make (Remote) Work Happen via a centralized platform that includes SSO, MFA, directory services, device management, conditional access policies, UEM, and integration with common SaaS apps for collaboration and HR, to cover the entire employee lifecycle.
Our community team sits in corporate marketing. We’re responsible for our total community program, which includes our highly active Slack group, IT admin meetups, corporate social media handles, 3rd party forum outreach, influencer relations, and community champion activities—like our growing weekly IT Hour broadcast with replays on YouTube. And now, it includes the JumpCloud community.
2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros and what was your experience before making the switch from a previous solution or investing in new technology.
We have many passionate users who love our platform, as evidenced by our highly active Slack group. But we wanted to do much more to reach IT admins where they are and do more than just another product community—we wanted to create an industry space where all IT admins are welcome regardless of what platform or directory they use. It’s tough out there when you’re a 1 or 2 person shop, so wouldn’t it be nice to find others and talk about challenges and solutions? Yes! We also wanted to create “one IT community to rule them all” so that admins don’t have to go to 10 different sites to find what they need. It’s a work in progress, but we are headed in that direction.
A few years ago, we started with a small Slack group to connect JumpCloud users and help free-tier customers discuss work and solve problems. But it quickly outgrew the message limit and awesome answers were getting lost over time. It couldn’t be found via search engines, so the content was harder to share. And, we couldn’t get the data we wanted to track growth and who the biggest superfans were.
We decided to create a forum where we could host all of these discussions and content, while creating opportunities for connections. Take a technical product, add in passionate customers and users who love JumpCloud, then look at areas where these subject matter experts are underserved, and we have an opportunity for the community to become a type of outsourced IT brain—where everyone is able to share their experience and ask questions, regardless of skill level or years in the industry.
We started with a strategy that informed what type of technology we would need in order to move forward. And then we evaluated several platforms before choosing Khoros as a partner who can help us execute on our long term strategy and plans.
3. What were your goals when investing in Khoros technology and what successes have you already experienced because of the investment? Were you able to gain traction faster than expected? Please include metrics if possible.
Our goals were to launch in Q1 of 2022 and start with members of our Slack group (JumpCloud Lounge) and customers, expanding from there. The community has only been out of beta for a little over two months, but in that time we’ve seen customers and IT admins who don’t use our software join and post in the community.
Adoption within the company is strong, too, with over 180 employees having joined to date. Executive sponsorship has been critical to many facets of the launch, and they’ve shown excitement about the community by making sure we give company-wide updates about our efforts for total community. Execs also supported a direct link to the community in top level links on our dot com page, which drove almost 1700 referrals to the community in the first few weeks after it was added.
Our product team has gotten into the swing of things, launching some surveys and beta program sign ups. To date we’ve had great success with the number of companies who signed up, and the number of programs they volunteered for. Unfortunately I can’t share exact numbers, but it was much more popular than expected (by about 4x), so we’re looking at ways we can scale to other areas of the product team—not just for gathering volunteers, but leveraging community to gather feedback during the betas themselves as well. We also plan to leverage ideas for innovation once we can work out some back end processes and integrations (hint, hint, Khoros! 😉).
We launched a customer award program this year, called the Jumpies. We’re using the community leverage nominations and the first round of voting. In fact, there’s a “community choice” category that will be chosen by the community members exclusively! This is an exciting way to expand customer marketing by gathering stories directly from customers around how they are using our products.
Our content team has been a huge help in seeding content and producing helpful resources that IT admins can put to use right away in their day-to-day lives, which has inspired community members to add their own content as well. Demand for scripts has been high, with community members submitting some extremely useful homegrown scripts and templates already—so many that we created a repository for them and have plans to launch a KB to complement other community-sourced knowledge as well.
We’re an open community, so we don’t require membership to read or search content. This was a conscious decision to avoid inflating our product signups, but also to allow for better SEO referrals and optimization. Users can become a member when they are ready to post or interact with content.
Here’s what our community currently looks like when you are a visitor (with a few details scrubbed for privacy):
And this is what it looks like when I’m logged in:
We consider our launch a success with just under 12,000 visitors in our first 2 months after going live, with traffic and—more importantly—posts and activity growing daily.
The forums aren’t stand alone, though. They are a complementary part of a total community approach that includes several programs. The first of these is our IT Admin Community Network meetups, which we launched on meetup.com. Longer term, we’ll have an element of the meetups on the community, using groups and events.
We use a group hub to extend the conversation around our weekly IT Hour show. In the hub we post show notes, recordings, contest winners, and follow up questions. Each week we have a contest for the funniest comment on the latest news, and it has been a great way to engage our users and have fun. We’ve just started using group hubs and see a lot of fun things we can do with this content type.
All of these different parts of the program show how quickly our company is adopting the community internally to support the IT community and the way we do business. We’re a Product Led Growth company, but we are also deeply focused on our community of IT professionals. As we continue to integrate other areas of the company like JumpCloud University and more MSP-related content, our total community program will continue to grow and provide value to all IT admins, regardless of what platform or open directory they choose. We’ll still focus on making (remote) work happen and building one IT community to rule them all.