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>> Hey, everyone.
Welcome to this CUBE Conversation
that's part of the AWS startup showcase
Season Two, Episode Four.
I'm your host Lisa Martin.
Chase Doelling joins me,
the principles strategist at JumpCloud.
Chase, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to have you.
>> Chase: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Lisa.
I really appreciate the opportunity to come and hang out.
>> Let's talk about JumpCloud.
First of all, love the name.
This is an open directory platform.
Talk to the audience about what the platform is,
obviously, the evolution of the domain controller.
But give us that backstory?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And so, company was started,
and I think, from serial entrepreneurs,
and after kind of last exit,
taking a look around and saying,
"Why is this piece of hardware still the dominant force
when you're thinking about identities,
especially when the world is moving to cloud,
and all the different pieces that have been around it?"
And so, over the years,
we've evolved JumpCloud into an open directory platform.
And what that is, is we're managing your identities,
the devices that are associated to that,
all the access points that employees need
just to get their job done.
And the best part is, is we're able to do that
no matter where they are within the world.
>> It seems like kind of a reinvention
of how modern IT teams are getting worked done,
especially in these days of remote work.
Talk to me a little bit about the last couple of years
particularly as remote work exploded,
and here we are still probably,
permanently, in that situation?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And I think it's probably going to be one of those situations
where we stick with it for quite a while.
We had a very abrupt force
in making sure that essentially every IT and security team
could grapple with the fact
of their users are no longer coming into the office.
You know, how do we VPN into all of our different resources?
Those are very common and unfortunate pain points
that we've had over the last couple years.
And so, now, people have starting
to kind of get into the motion of it,
working from home,
having background and setups and other pieces.
But one of the main areas of concern,
especially as you're thinking about that,
is how does it relate to my security infrastructure,
or kind of my approach to my organization.
And making sure that too, on the tail end,
that a user's access and making sure
that they can get into everything that they need to do
in order to get work done, is still happening?
And so, what we've done, is we've really taken,
evolving and really kind of ripping apart
this notion of what a directory was.
'Cause originally, it was just like, great,
almost like a phone directory.
It's where people lived
they're going into all those different pieces.
But it wasn't set up for the modern world,
and kind of how we're approaching it,
and how organizations now are started with a credit card
and have all of their infrastructure.
And essentially, all of their IP,
is now hosted somewhere else.
And so, we wanted to take a different approach
where we're thinking about, not only managing that identity,
but taking an open approach.
So, matter where the identity's coming from,
we can integrate that into the platform
but then we're also managing and securing those devices,
which is often the most important piece
that we have sitting right in front of us
in order to get into that.
But then, also that final question,
of when you're accessing networks applications,
can you create the conditions for trust, right?
And so, if you're looking at zero trust,
or kind of going after different levels of compliance,
ISO, SOC2, whatever that might be,
making sure that you have all that put in place
no matter where your employees are.
So, in that way, as we kind of moved into this remote,
now hybrid world, it wasn't the office
as the gating point anymore, right?
So, key cards, as much as we love 'em, final part,
whereas the new perimeter,
the kind of the new barrier for organizations
especially how they're thinking about security,
is the people's identities behind that.
And so, that's the approach that we really wanted to take
as we continue to evolve and really open up
what a directory platform can do.
>> Yeah. Zero trust security, remote work.
Two things that have exploded in the last couple of years.
But as employees, we expected to be able
to still have the access that we needed to apps,
to the network, to WiFi, et cetera.
And, of course, on the security side, we saw massive changes
in the threat landscape that really,
obviously, security elevates to a board level conversation.
So, I imagine zero trust security, remote work,
probably compliance, you mentioned SOC2,
are some of the the key use cases
that you're helping organizations with?
>> Those are a lot of the drivers.
And what we do, is we're able to combine
a lot of different aspects that you need
for each one of those.
And so, now you're thinking about
essentially, the use case of someone joins an organization,
they need access to all these different things.
But behind the scenes,
it's a combination of identity access management,
device management, applications, networks, everything else,
and creating those conditions for them to do their roles.
But the other piece of that,
is you also don't want to be overly cumbersome.
I think a lot of us think about security
as like great biometrics, so I'm going to add in these keys,
I'm going to do everything else
to kind of get into these secured resources.
But the reality of it now, is those secure resources
might be AWS infrastructure.
It might be other Salesforce reporting tools.
It might be other pieces,
or kind of IP within the organization.
And those are now your crown jewel.
And so, if you're not thinking
about the identities behind them
and the security that you have
in order to facilitate that transaction,
it becomes a board level conversation very quickly.
But you want to do it in a way
that people can move forward with their lives,
and they're not spending a ton of time
battling the systems and procedures
you put in place to protect it,
but that it's working together seamlessly.
And so, that's where, kind of this notion for us
of bringing all these different technologies
into one platform.
You're able to consolidate a lot of those
and remove a lot of the friction
while maintaining the visibility,
and answering the question,
of who has access to what?
And when did they do that?
Those are the most critical pieces
that IT and security teams are asking themselves
when something happens.
And hopefully, on the preventative side
and not so much on the redacted side.
>> Have you seen the escalation up the C-Suite
change of the board in terms of really focusing
on how do we do identity management?
How do we do single sign on?
How do we do device management and network access?
Is that all the way up to the C-Suite board level as well?
>> It certainly can be.
And we've seen it in a lot of different conversations,
because now you are thinking
about all different portions of the organization.
And then, two, as we're thinking
about times we're currently in,
there's also a cost associated to that.
And so, when you start to consolidate
all of those technologies into one area,
now it becomes much more
of total cost optimization types of story
while you're still maintaining a lot of the security
and basic blocking and tackling
that you need for most organizations.
So, everything you just mentioned,
those are now table stakes
for a lot of small, medium, startups to be at the table.
So, how do you have access to enterprise level,
essentially technology,
without the cost that's associated to it.
And that's a lot of the trade offs
that organizations are facing
and having those types of conversations
as it relates to business preparedness
and how we're making sure
that we are putting our best foot forward,
and we're able to be resilient in
no matter what type, of either economic or security threat
that the organization might be looking at.
>> So, let's talk about the go-to market,
the strategy from a sales and marketing perspective.
Where are the customer conversations happening?
Are they at the IT level?
Are they higher up the stack?
>> It's really at, I'd say the IT level.
And so, by that, I mean the builders, the implementers,
everyone that's responsible
for putting devices in people's hands,
and making sure that they can do their job effectively.
And so, those are their,
I'd say the IT admins the world
as well as the managed service providers
who support those organizations,
making sure that we can enable them
to making sure that their organizations
or their client organizations
have all the tools that their disposable
to make sure that they have the security or the policies,
and the technology behind them
to enable all those different practices.
>> Let's unpack the benefits from an IT perspective?
Obviously, they're getting one console
that they can manage at all.
One user identity for email, and devices,
and apps, and things.
You mentioned regardless of location,
but this is also regardless of operating system, correct?
>> That's correct.
And so, part of taking an open approach,
is also the devices that you're running on.
And so, we take a cross OS approach.
So, Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, whatever it might be,
we can make sure that, that device is secure.
And so, it does a couple different things.
So, one, is the employees have device choice, right?
So, I'm a Mac person coming in.
If forced into a Windows, it'd be an interesting experience.
But then, also too, from the back end,
now you have essentially one platform
to manage your entire fleet.
And also give visibility and data
behind what's happening behind those.
And then, from the end user perspective as well,
everything's tied together.
And so, instead of having,
what we'll call user ID schizophrenia,
it might be one employee,
but hundreds of different identities and logins
just to get their work done.
We can now centralize that into one person,
making sure you have one password to get into your advice,
get into the network,
to get into your single sign on.
We also have push MFA associated with that.
So, you can actually create the conditions
for your most secured access,
or you understand, say, "Hey, I'm actually in the office.
I'm going to be a hybrid employee.
Maybe I can actually relax
some of those security concerns I might have
for people outside of the network."
And all we do, is making sure that we give
all that optionality to our IT admins,
manage service providers of the world
to enable that type of work for their employees to happen.
>> So, they have the ability to toggle that,
is critically important in this day and age
of the hybrid work model, that's probably here to stay?
>> It is, yeah.
And it's something that organizations change, right?
Our own organizations, they grow, they change different.
New threats might emerge,
or same old existing threats continue to come back.
And we need to just have better processes
and automations put within that.
And it's when you start to consolidate
all of those technologies,
not only are you thinking about the visibility behind that,
but then you're automating
a lot of those different pieces
that are already tightly coupled together.
And that actually is truly powerful
for a lot of the IT admins of the world,
because that's where they spend a lot of time,
and they're able to spend more time
helping users tackling big projects
instead of run rate security,
and blocking, and tackling.
That should be enabled
from the organization from the get go.
>> You mentioned automation.
And I think that there's got to be
a TCO reduction aspect here
with respect to security and IT practices.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Let's think about the opposite of that.
Let's say we have a laundry list of technology
that we need to go out and source.
One is, great, where the identity is,
so we have an identity provider.
Now, we need to make sure that we have application access
that might look like single sign on.
Now, we need to make sure,
you are who you are no matter where you are in the world.
Well, now we need multifactor authentication
and that might involve either a push button, or biometrics.
And then, well, great the device's in front of us,
that's a huge component,
making sure that I can understand,
not only who's on the device,
but that the device is secure,
that there's certificates there,
that there's policies that ensure the proper use of that
wherever it might be.
Especially, if I'm an employee,
either, it used to be on the the jet center
going between flying anywhere you need.
Now, it's kind of cross country, cross domain,
all those different areas.
And when you start to have that, it really unlocks,
essentially IT sprawl.
You have a lot of different pieces,
a lot of different contracts,
trying to figure out one technology works,
but the other might not.
And you're now you're creating workarounds
for all these different pieces.
So, the opposite of that, is essentially,
let's take all those technologies
and consolidate that into one platform.
So, not only is it cheaper essentially,
looking after that and understanding
all the different technologies,
but now it's all the other soft costs around it
that many people don't think about.
It's all the other automations.
It's all the workarounds
that you didn't have to do in the first place.
It's all the other pieces that you'd spend a lot of time
trying to wire it together.
Into the hopes of that,
it creates some security model.
But then again, you lose a lot of the visibility.
So, you might have an incident happen over here,
or a trigger, or alert,
but it's not tied to the rest of the stack.
And so, now you're spending a lot of time,
especially, either trying to understand.
And worse timing, is if you have an incident
and you're trying to understand what's happening?
Unraveling all of that as it happens, becomes impossible,
especially if it's not consolidated with one platform.
So, there's not only the hard cost aspect
of bringing all that together,
but also the soft costs of thinking
about how your business can perform,
or at least optimize for a lot
of those different standard processes,
including onboarding, offboarding,
and everything else in between.
>> Yeah. On the soft cost side, I can imagine.
I can see huge benefits for HR onboarding, offboarding.
I can see benefits for the employee experience period,
which directly relates to the customer experience.
So, in terms of the business impact
that JumpCloud can make,
it seems to be pretty horizontal
across any type of organization?
>> It is, and especially as you mentioned HR.
Because when you think about, where does the origin
of someone's identity start?
Well, typically, it starts with a resume
and that might be in applicant tracking software.
Now, we're going to get hired,
so we're going to move into HR,
because, well, everyone likes payroll,
and we need that in our lives, right?
But now you get into the second phase,
of great, now I've joined the organization.
Now, I need access to all of these different pieces.
But when you look at it, essentially horizontally,
from HR, all the way into the employee experience,
and their whole life cycle within the organization,
now you're touching multiple different teams
And that's one of the other,
I'd say benefits of that,
is now you're actually bringing in HR, and IT,
and security, and everyone else
that might be related within these kind of larger use cases
of making work happen all coming under.
And when they're tightly integrated,
it's also a lot more secure, right?
So, you're not passing notes along.
You're not having a checklist of other stuff,
especially when it relates to something
as important as someone's identity,
which is more often than not,
the most common attack vector for people to go after.
Because they know it's the keys to the kingdom.
There's going to be a lot of different attempts,
maybe malware and other pieces,
but a lot of it comes back into, can I impersonate,
or become the person that I want within the organization,
because it's the identity allows you to access
all those different pieces.
And so, if it's coming from a disjointed process
or something that's not as tightly as it could be,
that's where it really opens up
a lot of different vectors
that organizations don't think about.
>> Right, and those vectors are only growing
and multiplying as we know, and here to stay.
When you're in customer conversations
what do you describe as maybe the top three differentiators
of JumpCloud compared to the competition?
>> Well, I think a lot of it is we take an open approach.
And so, by that, I mean, it's one we're not locking into,
I'd say different vendors or other areas.
We're really looking into making sure
that we can work within your environment as it stands today,
or where you want to migrate in the future.
And so, this could be a combination
of on-prem resources, cloud resources, or nothing
if you're starting a company from today.
And the second, is again, coming back
into how we're looking at devices.
So, we take a cross OS approach
that way, no matter what you're operating on,
it all comes back from the same dashboard.
But then, finally, we leverage a ton of different protocols
to make sure it works with everything
within your current technology stack,
as well as it continues to elevate and evolve over time.
So, it could be LD app and Radius, and Sam, and skim,
and open ID Connect, and open APIs.
And whatever that might be,
we are able to tie in all those different pieces.
So, now, all of a sudden, it's not just one platform,
but you have your whole business tied into
as that gives you some flexibility too, to evolve.
Because even during the pandemic and the shift for remote,
there's a lot of technology choices that shifted.
A lot of people are like,
"Okay, now's the time to go to the cloud."
There might be other events that organizations change.
There's other things that might happen.
So, creating that flexibility for organizations
to move and make those calls,
is essentially how we're differentiating ourselves.
And we're not locking you into this,
walled garden of technology that's just our own.
We really want to make sure that we can operate,
and be that glue, so that way,
no matter what you're trying to do
and making sure that your work is being done,
we can help facilitate that.
>> Nice. No matter what happens.
Because boy, at this day, anything's possible.
One more question for you about your AWS partnership.
Talk to me a little bit about that?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So, we are preferred ADP identity provider
and SSO provider for AWS.
And so, now rebranded under their identity center.
But it's crucial for a lot of our organizations
and joint customers because again, when we think
about a lot of organization IP
and how they operate as a business, is tied into AWS.
And so, really understanding,
who has the right level of access?
Who should be in there or not?
And when too, you should challenge in making sure
that actually there's something fishy there.
Like let's make sure
that they're not just traveling to Europe on a sabbatical,
and it's really who they are instead of a threat actor.
Those are some of the pieces when we're thinking
about creating that authentication,
but then also, the right authorization
into those AWS resources.
And so, that's actually something
that we've been very close to, especially,
I'd say that the origins of a company.
Because a lot of startups, that's where they go.
That's where they begin their journey.
And so, we meet them where they are,
and making sure that we're protecting
not only everything else within their organization,
but also what they're trying to get into,
which is typically AWS
>> Meeting customers where they are. It's all about that.
Chase, thank you so much for joining me on the program
talking about JumpCloud, it's open directory platform.
The benefits, the capabilities,
what's in it for IT, HR, security, et cetera.
We appreciate all of your insights and time.
Where do you want to point folks to go to learn more?
>> Well, absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for having us.
And I'd say, if you're curious about any
and all these different technologies,
the best part is everything I talked about
is free up to 10 users, 10 devices.
So, just go to jumpcloud.com.
You can create an organization,
and it's great for startups, people at home.
Any size company that you're at,
we can help support all of those different facets
in bringing in those different types of technologies
all into one roof.
>> Awesome. Chase, thank you so much.
This is awesome, go to jumpcloud.com.
For Chase Doelling, I'm Lisa Martin.
We want to thank you so much for giving us
some of your time and watching this CUBE Conversation.
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