eBook

Ask anyone responsible for keeping IT up and running for small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) — the world has changed. And as SMEs strive to compete with
larger companies for customers, partners, and employees, that change is ushering in

Leveling the
some new challenges for the future.

Playing Field
for SMEs SME IT
Creating Scalable Seamless
Seamless
Experiences Through IT Unification
Flexible

On-Demand

© 2021 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved.

The Stakes Are High for SME IT

For the past two decades, digital transformation, cloud migration, and the consumerization of IT have been driving Employees now value remote work, flexible hours, and bring your own device (BYOD) more than on-premise amenities.
the demand for more flexible, frictionless, and on-demand services. For example, users from around the world can In fact, many employees would sooner quit their job than quit working remotely.3 In short, they value the sort of work-life
collaborate on a Google Doc, regardless of if they are on a Windows laptop or an iPhone. These are the kinds of scalable balance and enjoyable working conditions that can only be achieved through scalable seamless experiences.
seamless experiences that customers, partners, and employees have come to expect. And the demand has only been
And the benefits to remote work weren’t one-sided: remote organizations enjoyed higher productivity and significant
accelerating during the past two years of remote work.
cost savings. Now, many remote organizations do not plan to return to the office at all.
But it’s not just individual success that’s at stake. We need SMEs to succeed if we’re to find new post-pandemic prosperity.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, SMEs are critical to our economic recovery.1 What Survival Looks Like in the Long Term
And in order for SMEs to succeed and thrive, they need to attract and retain the best talent — high-performance talent is
more than 400% more productive than average.2 According to The Role of IT Managers in Post-Pandemic Recovery for SMEs, the ongoing management of remote workers
has been the biggest challenge to their IT team since the start of the pandemic — nearly two-thirds of SME IT workers
feel overwhelmed trying to manage remote work.4 SME IT admins have a hard job that has only gotten harder during the
pandemic. The complexity of remote work and its security risks are increasing faster than budgets. Like everyone else, IT
Scalable seamless experiences are those services that are able to grow with a growing
admins want scalable and seamless services that can reduce their workload.
business, whether that is 15 employees or 1,500. Automation, integration, transparency,
And while many businesses focus almost exclusively on how to create compelling digital experiences for their customers,
flexibility, and ease of use are all hallmarks of scalable seamless experiences.
what is really interesting is how important the employee experience is to the individual and collective success of SMEs.
Nine out of 10 SME IT professionals agree that the employee experience is an important factor when making IT purchasing
decisions.5 IT admins want technology that unifies their existing stack, enables remote work environments, and is easy to
Scalable seamless experiences enable organizations to inspire employee confidence in their culture, such that their use. Clearly, SME IT professionals are concerned with seamless experiences for their users as well as themselves.
employees become brand ambassadors. This positive experience is paid forward directly to customers and partners, who
benefit from the higher quality effort that comes from each employee’s contribution to the organization at large. Best of With the urgent transition to remote work behind us, SMEs must now plan for the long-term future of work — a future
all, organizations can close the gap between security and productivity, enabling their IT admins to achieve both without defined by the “work from anywhere” mandate. The majority of workers indicate they want more flexibility in their work
the need for additional resources. schedules, work locations, and how they get work done. It is clear that SMEs need to modernize their infrastructure to
support remote work as seamlessly as they once supported their offices; the most clear and direct path to a modernized
What’s more, startup culture influenced SMEs for so long that certain amenities became practically required for attracting infrastructure is through IT unification.
and retaining talent, such as fitness centers, beer taps, and pingpong tables. But the allure of these attractive office spaces
has been diminished since the pandemic forced many to work from home, opening their eyes to a new set of workplace IT unification is the process of identifying a platform (or suite of interrelated technologies) to become the core of your
amenities and perks. IT stack, incorporating it throughout your stack, integrating with critical systems that surround your stack, and finally
consolidating around the core by shedding irrelevant or unnecessary legacy tools.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  2
The Stakes Are High for SME IT

IT Unification: A Path to Seamless Experiences

IT needs to be able to support employees spread across the globe, operating systems spread across devices, and company
resources spread across the cloud. Organizations need to invest in the right IT infrastructure, but unfortunately most legacy
solutions, while comfortable and seemingly entrenched, are not typically flexible or compatible with modern solutions,
making it challenging to integrate or consolidate around legacy infrastructure. Thus, legacy technology can hamper an
organization’s ability to unify its stack and develop a competitive edge.

For one, device management has become much more complex compared to the traditional all-Windows shop. To maintain
the pace of a modern IT ecosystem, IT admins need a modern device management system that enables them to view what
software and apps are installed on remote devices, as well as seamlessly controlling, monitoring, managing, and updating
all of it without interrupting users. This sort of modern device management is also beneficial to maintaining compliance and
passing audits.

In addition, legacy architecture tends to be fairly scattered in terms of vendors and solution types, which can create data
duplication, brittle integrations, and data siloing. While keeping functionality and systems contained within one platform
streamlines both management and the end-user experience, a scattered architecture made up of components that have
been gathered ad hoc over the years tends to do the opposite. SMEs often find they need to consolidate to deliver seamless
experiences and scale.

Scalable seamless experiences mean employees can be more productive, customers and partners can be more engaged, and
IT staff are free to work on more meaningful projects. But first, organizations must overcome the inertia of legacy solutions.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  3
Active Directory — A Monolithic Solution in a Distributed World

Many IT admins wind up using Active Directory to manage IT resources because they feel like they don’t have a choice. Even before the realities of remote work became the new normal, IT admins struggled with AD when they wanted to use
Unfortunately, that means many employees wind up without a choice when it comes to how they work. That can be a sore non-Microsoft resources, such as Google Workspace or Apple devices. MacOS adoption has increased more than 300%
spot for organizations trying to compete in an increasingly open and flexible world. in the past 10 years6 and a quarter of organizations are completely cloud-based.7 AD tethers organizations to the Windows
domain at a time when flexibility and choice are at a premium.
Active Directory (AD) is a behemoth built for legacy environments. AD was developed late last millennium to replace
Windows NT domains, a domain management and user authentication solution that had a few performance issues of its own. When it comes to cloud services, Active Directory lacks native integration with web-based applications (via SAML) or
infrastructure (like Amazon Web Services). In heterogeneous environments, AD lacks native endpoint management,
But as time marches on, digital transformation and cloud migration trends have resulted in Microsoft adding layers upon
group policy functions, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for both Mac and Linux. AD is a monolithic solution that is
layers to retrofit AD for modern architectures — or worse, ignoring them completely.
ill-suited for modern environments.
And just like any behemoth, AD is slow-moving and riddled with blind spots. AD was designed for the historic network
Even Azure AD, Microsoft’s cloud-based directory offering, is intended to function as an extension, rather than a
operating system model that is now largely obsolete.
replacement, of an on-prem AD instance. Azure AD incorporates more cloud functionality into its stack, but it has
The trends of the past two decades have been further catalyzed by the shift to remote work. Employees want the seamless limited directory management functionality when compared to AD, including the loss of group policy management,
experience of working from anywhere on any device, but AD doesn’t always support that goal. organizational unit management, and legacy authentication functions like LDAP and Kerberos. Microsoft’s cloud-based
version of a domain controller, Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS), solves some of these problems by
“When COVID hit, we were — from a user and account management standpoint — not ready for it,” said Mitch Anderson,
offering a full directory that doesn’t rely on on-premise infrastructure. However, it too comes with its share of limitations,
director of systems engineering at Boulder Heavy Industries. “That really moved us forward to accommodate this strange
like more restricted administrative privileges.
occurrence where everyone’s now remote. They’re not connecting to the VPN reliably, and any time there’s a password
issue it’s a nightmare and a half to get them back online.” Because of these gaps, organizations have frequently had to invest in additional mobile device management (MDM) and
identity and access management (IAM) solutions, which usually require additional identity bridges and connections to
implement and manage. And that, in turn, just complicates the user experience.

Sapling, an HR automation service, found that its IT team was spending much of
their time managing and integrating a complex mix of IT solutions, as well as managing
users. They were using multiple point solutions for IAM, MDM, single sign-on (SSO),
and password vaulting. The team once spent more than 60 hours in one month on
Cabify, a Spanish ride-sharing company, wanted to manage user access and
cybersecurity for more than 1,500 employees. AD represented a major roadblock
provisioning activities.
because it was incompatible with Windows Home Edition, which accounted for about
“Picking the best-of-breed tool in each area sounds good because you can get the 80% of Cabify’s PCs. The remaining 20% were Mac and Linux, which were also not
best from each, but the problem is that you need to have enough experts,” said Ramesh supported by AD.
Doddi, vice president of engineering at Sapling. “Instead of one person, you need
“With a company like ours, implementing Active Directory would have been like putting a
to train three people in three different areas, and then afterward you need to build
big dinosaur in the middle of the room,” said Enrique Salgado, global IT director at Cabify.
leadership around it. The cost footprint around it grows.”

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  4
Cloud-Based Directory Services — One Directory for All

But there’s a new approach that avoids these additional costs and JumpCloud also enables organizations to centralize their identities, manage
complications. JumpCloud’s solution is to enhance AD — or replace it entirely access, control device settings, and more. And because it is cloud-based,
— by extending directory services to virtually any resource (and in so doing there is no hardware required — that means lower costs and less complexity.
offering the freedom of choice to IT managers and the employees they That is especially beneficial for IT admins of rapidly scaling businesses that
support). In fact, JumpCloud’s solutions have been developed from the ground would rather focus their resources elsewhere.
up with lightweight modern standards, enabling more speed and flexibility
“It’s been nice having centralized control over our global IT environment. We
when agility is a competitive advantage. After all, no one wants to tell their all-
have 30+ offices across 12 countries, and there are only seven of us in IT. Some
star DevOps team that they can’t use Linux or their CEO that they can’t
of our offices don’t have their own IT department, so we have to manage their
use a MacBook.
environment remotely. It’s been incredibly helpful to have a cloud directory
The fact that AD does not connect to cloud or non-Microsoft resources natively service with a web-based console that enables every Cabify IT administrator
means that IT admins have to supplement AD with additional directories in to easily manage an office’s IT environment regardless of where the office is,”
each application or on each service, which require time-consuming manual said Salgado. “JumpCloud is really empowering us to let our people work from anywhere,”
processes to manage. Managing multiple directories and identities per said Anderson.
It’s an approach that’s been carefully crafted to enhance not just the employee
employee through a collection of third-party services is both inefficient
experience, but the IT manager’s experience, as well. JumpCloud empowers In short, JumpCloud really does offer one platform for all. Whether in the cloud
and insecure.
IT admins to provision user identities and access to applications through or on-prem, organizations can securely manage identities, devices, and access,
SAML, Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning, and SCIM, enabling easy integrations all from a single platform, regardless of where employees work. That means
with resources typically out of reach for AD. JumpCloud supports Windows, organizations can eliminate extraneous point solutions they need to manage
User Security Settings

Onboard New User

MDM Mac, and Linux authentication and provides group-based access and policy non-Microsoft products like Google Workspace, macOS, Zoom, or Slack.
management to control device settings. Organizations can enforce MFA and
Password Settings

MFA
Session Settings

Password Configurations

So think about it. What is the real cost of AD to your organization? Besides the
use conditional access controls to enforce Zero Trust device security.
Policies

Company VPN
SSO obvious costs of hardware and software, AD requires additional investments
What’s more, JumpCloud makes it easy to migrate Windows systems from in things like maintenance, add-on software requirements, and network
Trusted Device

existing AD environments with its Active Directory Migration Utility (ADMU). equipment, plus the time required to manage it all. But the JumpCloud
Alternatively, organizations that aren’t ready to rip-and-replace AD can extend directory platform offers a cost-effective solution that covers all aspects of
it with JumpCloud Active Directory Integration, which connects on-premise managing your identity, device, and access in one consolidated platform —
AD identities to domain and non-domain resources alike, such as Mac and no point solutions required. Employees can work however they like with no
That’s why JumpCloud’s solutions enable organizations to unify their entire Linux devices, cloud services, and more. With a bi-directional identity sync, AD hassles for IT admins.
IT stack, replacing AD, MDM, and IAM solutions with an all-in-one access Integration enables organizations to tackle their roadmap of consolidation at a
control and device management solution. With JumpCloud, SME IT admins “We use the time we save using JumpCloud to build experiences for our
pace that works for them; while they systematically incorporate and integrate
can securely connect their users to virtually all of their resources with a single customers,” said Doddi.
the JumpCloud platform throughout their stack, they can fully manage their AD
identity. That means their users can use any service on any application from users remotely from the cloud. That’s a pretty big deal in an era of remote work.
anywhere, no problem.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  5
Onboarding Employees — A Lasting Impression

Everyone knows that first impressions matter. Unfortunately, 5% of employees will quit after a disastrous first day, and 20%
of employees will quit within the first 45 days.8 The National Federation of Independent Business reports that 40% of
businesses have trouble filling open positions.9 That can cause a lot of unwanted turbulence with customers, partners,
and other employees.

That’s why employee onboarding is such an important process. New employees expect access to whatever applications and
services they need to be successful, but provisioning new users and devices can become a very time-consuming manual
process for IT admins. It is a source of friction on both sides of the aisle.

Organizations should be eager to empower their employees to succeed from day one, which means that IT teams need to
make certain new employees have the right access to the right applications (while limiting access where it isn’t needed).
Documenting role-based policies can help manage this process, but it still adds complexity since different departments have
different access requirements.

Traditionally, IT admins must maintain and install a master disk image (i.e., a gold image) with the appropriate applications
and configurations on each device before it is ever touched by a new employee. Usually this involves physically ordering and
configuring the device before handing it off to the user.

With this process, an IT admin would need to obtain the employee’s information, such as name, title, and department, their
access and application requirements, and so forth. Then they would need to order a new device or retrieve one from storage
and manually configure it. After that comes more installation of software and the creation of new accounts for cloud services, as
well as user licenses and authentication for each application. Finally, the machine would be ready for delivery to its new user.

This traditional onboarding method involves a lot of checking the box, validations, and records-keeping. By the end of it all, IT
admins can spend hours manually provisioning a new employee. That doesn’t sound very scalable (or enjoyable) when growing
companies may add numerous new employees each month. And remote environments further complicate the process.

Working from anywhere has made onboarding employees more difficult. Unfortunately, device management tends to be an
office-based process since IT admins need to physically retrieve laptops from storage or manually provision them. What’s more,
millions of new employees have never been in physical contact with their co-workers, and that includes their IT admins.

Onboarding can feel like a full-time job, but what happens when an IT admin gets pulled into another urgent project or has
too many employees joining at once? A disappointing number of employees have shown up to work on their first day without
a laptop ready for them — that is certain to leave the wrong first impression. The physical IT onboarding model can create a
roadblock for new employees that are eager to work while simultaneously draining IT teams of their time and attention.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  6
Zero-Touch Deployment: 100% Wow Factor
JumpCloud Zero-Touch Enrollment streamlines onboarding with a seamless experience that accelerates new employee
provisioning from hours to minutes. New employees are amazed by the polish and prestige of the process. IT admins are
relieved to eliminate another time-consuming manual process as their business continues to scale. In fact, IT admins may
never even need to lay their hands on the device.
JumpCloud also combines a powerful device management system with identity management and SSO, so that IT
teams can manage their entire onboarding process from a single, cloud-based console. Windows, Linux, and
macOS devices can all be deployed, configured, and managed from anywhere, to anywhere. That gives
employees the flexibility to work however they want to help attract and retain the best talent.
IT admins can automate user and device
settings for Mac, Windows, and Linux
machines by grouping new employees
with the team they are joining to grant
access to the applications and services
they need to make work happen. These
pre-configured settings save time for
the new employee and IT admins alike.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  7
Onboarding Employee Devices — A Lasting Impression

“We can provision users and assign them directly to the device without touching the machine,” said Brian Coleman,
founder of Matchstick Birmingham, an IT consulting and contracting firm in Birmingham, Alabama. “It’s a game
changer to be able to create and provision new users no matter where they are — especially now, with the pandemic
and offices essentially going away.”

JumpCloud even enables IT admins to send a new Mac to a remote worker without ever having to touch it. When the
new user unboxes their Mac, their initial login unifies their identity with their device, configures the device, and gives
the user appropriate access to all corporate resources through their JumpCloud credentials.

It’s that simple. As soon as the new employee connects for the first time, everything happens automatically —
configurations, software installation, security settings, and more. Manual provisioning that could take hours is
completed in minutes. This is a serious wow factor for new employees and it enables them to get to work immediately.

In short, JumpCloud helps you create an amazing first impression with your employees by eliminating the risks,
complexities, and costs associated with creating and managing users’ identities across multiple systems. IT admins
can streamline their solutions by integrating advanced device management capabilities with JumpCloud’s platform,
eliminating the need for separate MDM and IAM solutions.

Yellow Dog, a growing studio in Denver, recently found itself facing an outdated, unscalable
approach to onboarding and managing devices. Onboarding and adjusting devices was becoming a
full-time job for co-founder Dan Mulligan. To manage the increasing number of Mac and PC devices,
YellowDog turned to JumpCloud.
“I’m able to change things that would have taken a lot longer before,” said Mulligan. “This has just made
the whole process so much easier. If an employee needs to access certain servers or resources, I can
rewrite access pretty much immediately.” And as for onboarding, “New hires walk in and their desktops
are ready to go,” he explained.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  8
 Device Management:
A Complex Challenge
The new prevalence of remote and hybrid-remote workplaces has
diversified the types of devices organizations use and changed what
it takes to secure them.
Non-Windows devices are no longer confined to developers and
picky CEOs; in fact, a recent survey of IT SMEs found that only about
68% of the devices in SMEs were Windows.10 In addition, BYOD
policies have made smartphones and tablets more common in the
workplace. With many organizations maintaining at least a partially
remote structure, companies need to manage an increasing
number and diversity of devices connecting from anywhere.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  9
Device Management: A Complex Challenge

To further complicate things, workplaces are no longer defined by a one-

device-per-employee setup. Employees may answer emails on their laptops
Secure, Scalable Device Management voluntary enrollment for users, separating corporate and personal data,
blocking the company from viewing or accessing personal data, and offering
during work hours and on their personal smartphone after hours; some MDM has become a critical solution to these challenges and a necessity for employees the option to unenroll at any time without losing personal data.
employees use different devices for different tasks, and some use their remote and hybrid SMEs. MDM offers companies the security tools they need On the other hand, MDM programs for corporate-owned devices can be
personal device as their main work device. This wide variety of use cases, to keep all devices accessing corporate data safe while maintaining users’ much more extensive. For corporate-owned devices, JumpCloud allows
combined with the fact that not all devices are connecting to the network privacy. Automation makes these capabilities repeatable and seamless, companies to specify password/passcode complexity requirements, restrict
from the physical office, make it difficult to keep track of the devices accessing facilitating a scalable, easy-to-manage device environment. usage, configure the device remotely, lock and wipe the device remotely, and
corporate resources, let alone secure them.
With JumpCloud’s MDM tool, companies can track, configure, and control schedule and track updates.
From the perspective of a bad actor, these decentralized environments create devices that access their corporate data. It’s platform agnostic, allowing IT Update and patch management are key components of facilitating scalable
a larger attack surface area with more pathways to the corporate infrastructure. admins to manage macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and iPad systems, and it security with MDM. JumpCloud’s MDM makes updates manageable and
And although some SMEs might think they’re too small to be a meaningful combines with the JumpCloud cloud directory platform for unified security predictable at a large scale so that organizations can remain secure and
target for hackers, the data would beg to differ. More than half of mid-market and management. Organizations can embrace freedom, flexibility, and choice productive without having to risk downtime during critical business hours.
companies have experienced a breach, and 40% of those breaches have without any added complexity. And employees can use any device and
caused more than eight hours of downtime — a whole workday.11 That is some continue to work remotely — enabling the modern approach to work they With JumpCloud’s MDM, IT admins can schedule updates overnight, over the
serious friction for customers, partners, and employees that can result in lost have come to expect. weekend, on shutdown, or on restart. They can also send out update prompts
revenue and diminished productivity. to employees to schedule at their convenience and block updates on devices
As the lines between personal and business devices become blurred, MDM that aren’t ready to receive them yet. And to keep everything transparent,
However, security isn’t the only consideration when it comes to managing programs must account for the employee experience to be sustainable IT admins can view devices’ update and patch status at a glance, including
mobile devices; companies need to respect employees’ personal privacy and cultivate employee buy-in. The level of control over devices should pulling quick insights like what percentage of devices have implemented the
as well. Using a device for both personal and work activity introduces the correspond with device type and who ultimately owns the device. This latest patch. In short, it makes updates easy to implement for the user and easy
possibility of an employee’s personal data being exposed to their employer. helps ensure security and scalable device management without creating a to manage for the admin.
This is a significant concern for employees; a company’s failure to respect cumbersome or uncomfortable experience for employees.
employee privacy can reduce satisfaction and retention rates. A holistic view of your IT environment enables more informed decisions
Employee-owned BYOD devices, for example, should allow the employees without impacting productivity. Remote management ensures maximum
Balancing security and privacy is critical when managing mobile devices — and to retain privacy and autonomy over their personal data on those devices. uptime and security without the need for devices or admins to be physically
organizations can’t afford to compromise one for the other. To power seamless JumpCloud’s MDM platform enables this privacy and autonomy by allowing present — and that’s a big deal in the work-from-anywhere era.
growth, this balance needs to be easy to implement and repeat. That’s where
MDM tools come in.

“Balancing security and privacy is critical when managing mobile devices —

and organizations can’t afford to compromise one for the other.”
© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  10
Passwords: Vulnerable from Day One

The first computer password was created in 1960 by a group led by Fernando Corbató. And one year later, the first theft of But even if employees do their best, organizations are still vulnerable to social engineering, brute force attacks, and other
a computer password was perpetrated by their colleague, Allan Scherr. (He wanted more time on the computer than they advanced techniques. Two-thirds of users (even IT admins) admit they share passwords.17 These shared accounts lack
were willing to give him.)12 Today, stolen passwords are the number one source of data breaches.13 Hacker forums are full individual ownership and accountability, which opens the door for insider attacks. That could seriously disrupt business
of passwords for sale.14 And the work-from-anywhere model has even made it worse. when it comes to accessing privileged cloud infrastructure or Linux environments.
Even the process of remembering and resetting passwords can cost an organization $5.2 million in lost productivity.15 So it’s easy to see why IT admins and employees are suffering from password fatigue. They’re wasting an average of 10.9
When it comes to seamless experiences, passwords are one of the most imperfect systems that still exist today. hours per year entering and resetting their passwords.18 Employees may forget their passwords, or compliance policies
The real problem with passwords is that they are everywhere. We need a password to log into our devices. We need a may require them to be changed every 60-90 days.19 When employees are used to many of their favorite personal apps
password to log into our email. We need a password to log into our cloud services. Sometimes we even need a password and social media sites keeping them logged in indefinitely, dealing with passwords all the time at work seems pretty
to log into our vault of passwords. The list goes on. antiquated by comparison.
So it should come as no surprise that more than half of Despite passwords being hard to remember, they’re easy
employees reuse their passwords across business and to steal — which means oftentimes they end up doing
personal accounts, creating even more vulnerability “Even if employees more good for hackers than the people they’re meant
and loss of control for IT managers. to protect. From Bill Gates20 to Allan Scherr, the industry
do their best, has been predicting the death of passwords for 20 years.
Unfortunately, password reuse leaves organizations
vulnerable to credential stuffing, where a hacker organizations are When passwords are the only way to authenticate a user,
organizations are leaving themselves vulnerable to attack.
obtains a list of usernames and passwords from one still vulnerable to
breach and uses them to try breaking into other Fortunately, we’re starting to wake up from this horrific
accounts. Even when passwords aren’t reused, they social engineering, dream state and beginning to embrace a new paradigm —
often tend to be weak. (It’s even worse when people brute force attacks, passwordless security.
reuse weak passwords!).
and other advanced
For example, the three most common passwords in
a massive LinkedIn password leak were “123456,” techniques.”
“linkedin,” and “password.”16 Shocking, but true.
Weak passwords leave organizations vulnerable to
password spray attacks, where attackers automate
the process of trying to log in with these common
passwords.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  11
Reducing Reliance on the Password:
Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication
As passwords decline in effectiveness, organizations are turning to alternative methods
to bolster the password’s security — or even eliminate the password altogether in favor
of something more secure. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO),
and passwordless authentication hardware are top avenues to heightening security by
eliminating reliance on the password.
The Center for Internet Security recommends MFA as its first choice for secure
authentication.21 Instead of relying on the strength of a password and an employee’s
ability to remember it, MFA requires secondary factors, such as authentication keys or
SMS messages.
Adding a second factor creates a major roadblock for hackers and significantly reduces
the chances of unauthorized access. MFA can be an easy and cost-effective solution to
protect against the repercussions of password fatigue. And it can be as seamless as a push
notification, just like an employee is used to receiving from their favorite apps. It reduces
friction with user-friendly, but secure, technology.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  12
Reducing Reliance on the Password: Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication

Conditional access policies can further strengthen and streamline this process by evaluating the location of the user, their device, the security of their
network, and their device health to determine whether to require MFA. A user trying to access their email from a trusted device on the corporate
network could be allowed to bypass the MFA requirement, but a user trying to access privileged accounts from an unknown device in another
country should be challenged with MFA. In this way, IT admins can easily maintain security while their employees remain happily productive.

SSO further reduces an organization’s reliance on passwords by only requiring them once per session. Organizations can eliminate password fatigue
with SSO by consolidating dozens of passwords into a single secure identity. JumpCloud True Single Sign-On™ (True SSO), for example, securely
authorizes users to virtually all the resources they need to do their work — regardless of platform, protocol, provider, or location — with one set of
credentials. No more complexity, no more remembering, no more resets.

And fewer passwords means less work for IT teams, too. When Schernecker Property Services (SPS) started using JumpCloud’s SSO, it immediately
noticed the time-saving benefits in addition to the security boost.

“One of the biggest results has been the reduction in help desk calls for password resets. People only have to remember one password now for
everything,” said David Garrity, senior technology manager at SPS.

“Before JumpCloud, we weren’t enabling multi-factor authentication, because people would have several multi-factor applications, connections
to manage independently. People also weren’t always taking good care of their passwords as there were so many different passwords to manage.
Adopting JumpCloud allowed us to conform with industry standards for password management,” he said. “JumpCloud was a huge step forward in
getting our security in place.”

To take things one step further, the Fast Identification Online (FIDO) Alliance has paved a path to a passwordless future by developing the principles
and protocols needed to get there. As users grow accustomed to abandoning their passwords for personal services, they will come to expect the
same from their business services as well. In fact, more than half of employees would prefer passwordless logins.22

FIDO2 uses authentication hardware, such as a security key or a biometric scanner, to authenticate users with the press of a button. FIDO2 can be
enhanced with seamless MFA solutions, such as a push notification, to facilitate a secure passwordless login.

Pragmatically, reducing an organization’s reliance on the password requires a unified platform to manage IAM, MFA, and SSO to keep friction low
and security high. JumpCloud can power secure authentication from a centralized identity directory by supporting FIDO2 logins to its User Portal,
offering a push notification MFA app, interfacing with third-party authenticator apps, enabling conditional access policies, and more.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  13
Start off on the Right Foot: Unify to Scale

SMEs need to create scalable seamless experiences for their employees, How well is your infrastructure positioned to support 1 https://unctad.org/news/supporting-small-businesses-critical-covid-19-recovery

customers, and partners, if they hope to compete in the post-pandemic normal 2 Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle Jr., “The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality in individual

and help the world get back on its feet. While everyone has a role to play, the
scalability? performance,” Personal Psychology, Volume 65, Issue 1, Spring 2012, pp. 79–119, https://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com.
key to IT’s contribution to these scalable experiences is through IT unification, — Can your infrastructure support ongoing change?
3 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/return-to-office-employees-are-quitting-instead-of.
a long-term strategy achieved through identification, incorporation, — Can it do so flexibly and cost-efficiently? giving-up-work-from-home

integration, and, ultimately, consolidation. — Is your directory hosted on-prem or in the cloud? 4 https://jumpcloud.com/resources/it-trends-report-remote-work-security-cloud-services

5 https://jumpcloud.com/resources/creating-a-new-normal-for-sme-it-in-2022
— Identification: The first step towards a strategy of IT unification begins — How much of your foundational infrastructure is hosted on-premises?
6 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202001
with the identification of what makes up the core of the IT stack. This What would it take to migrate those components to the cloud?
is often a single platform from which all IT resources can be managed, 7 https://www.blissfully.com/saas-trends/2020-annual-report/

secure, or leveraged: your single source of truth. However, this What technology do you need to incorporate into 8 https://www.effectory.com/knowledge/the-3-most-important-aspects-of-a-successful-onboarding.
program/
sometimes consists of a small collection of critical systems that support
IT operations at large.
your stack? 9 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-17/the-curious-case-of-hard-to-find-workers
— Do you have a tool that can manage your users’ identities? 10 https://jumpcloud.com/resources/creating-a-new-normal-for-sme-it-in-2022
— Incorporation: Make sure all the tools and functionality you need from
your core are incorporated throughout your stack. Often, after auditing — How many identities does each user have? 11 https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/global/hr_hr/solutions/small-business/pdf/small-mighty-threat.pdf

their architecture tools and functionality and implementing the new — What would you need to do to reduce that number to one? 12 https://thinksetmag.com/issue-6/the-case-of-the-purloined-password
platform to fill key gaps, IT admins find there are duplicate functions and 13 https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/2021/2021-data-breach-investigations.report.pdf
areas where they can consolidate. — Do you have a tool that manages devices?
14 https://www.digitalshadows.com/blog-and-research/covid-19-concerns-for-cybersecurity/
— Integration: The elements within (and surrounding) an architecture — Does that tool grant visibility into all devices accessing corporate data —
15 https://www.yubico.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ponemon-Report-Infographic.pdf
need to work well with one another. Smooth integrations power including mobile and personal devices?
16 https://www.zdnet.com/article/these-are-the-worst-passwords-from-the-linkedin-hack/
seamless experiences, from automated onboarding to comprehensive
SSO. These are the experiences that empower SMEs to scale. Where can you integrate and consolidate? 17 https://www.yubico.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ponemon-Report-Infographic.pdf

18 Ibid.
— Consolidation: Combining tools and vendors where possible to cut — Are your identities and devices managed separately?
19 Ibid.
down on your infrastructure’s total cost of ownership (TCO) and continue — Is your directory separate from your device data?
20 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/gates-predicts-death-of-the-password/
to power even more seamless experiences that support scalability.
— Are your directory, IAM, and MDM tools provided by different vendors? 21 https://www.cisecurity.org/white-papers/cis-password-policy-guide/
While it can seem counterintuitive, consolidation reduces the number
of integrations, vendors, and platforms you have to work with, creating 22 https://www.yubico.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ponemon-Report-Infographic.pdf
JumpCloud is designed to deliver a cloud-based directory platform that unifies
scalable environments that are light, nimble, and highly efficient.
your IT stack. It incorporates and integrates everything you need to power
Through these four phases, IT admins can curate an infrastructure that’s scalable seamless experiences, and delivers them in one platform that’s easy
optimized to deliver the scalable seamless experiences that keep them for admins to manage and easy for employees to use. It’s free to try for up to 10
competitive in today’s marketplace. To start on your unification journey, users and 10 devices — try the platform free today to test out a consolidated
consider the following questions. platform in your environment. It even comes with 10 days of 24/7 in-app live
chat support to make sure it’s optimized to support your organization.

© 2022 JumpCloud Inc. All rights reserved. Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs  |  14
 The JumpCloud Directory Platform helps IT teams Make (Remote) Work Happen® by centralizing management of user identities and devices, enabling small and medium-sized
enterprises to adopt Zero Trust security models. JumpCloud® has a global user base of more than 180,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers including
Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400M from world-class investors including Sapphire Ventures,
General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike.

For more information on JumpCloud and how organizations everywhere are providing secure, frictionless access to all their IT resources, visit jumpcloud.com/why.

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