The cloud is a great equalizer that enables startups and smaller companies to scale quickly, and play on a more or less even playing field with larger organizations. Managed cloud services free businesses up from implementing, configuring, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure, and allow individuals to focus on the business. With all of the freedom cloud services provide, though, there is still a need for a directory service that defines who the users are, and controls which individuals have access to which resources. JumpCloud wants to move that to the cloud as well.
JumpCloud has established itself as a leading solution for managing security across a vast, rapidly-changing, virtual ecosystem in the cloud. Today, JumpCloud is announcing a new offering that takes builds on that foundation, and applies its experience to deliver Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS). JumpCloud claims its new service will allow organizations to stop managing directory services locally, and enable them to move to a fully-managed, cloud-based alternative to LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) or Microsoft AD (Active Directory).
“As we have seen with the transitions from Siebel to SalesForce, Exchange to Gmail, and file servers to DropBox, JumpCloud is enabling the transition of one of the last on-premise technologies to a fully managed service: the user directory,” says Rajat Bhargava, JumpCloud’s President and CEO in a press release statement. “Directory-as-a-Service brings IT teams the simplicity, ubiquity, and security of user and device management, all from the cloud.”
The JumpCloud DaaS services can act as the sole user store for an organization, or it can extend existing AD or LDAP user stores to the cloud. JumpCloud DaaS also integrates with single sign-on (SSO) providers so that IT admins are not forced to manage multiple directories.
“JumpCloud understands the need for directory services in the cloud,” said Salvatore D’Agostino, CEO of IDmachines. “Building on their secure shell configuration management tools, this offer puts in place cloud-to-machine, user authentication and other directory services. At IDmachines, we see this as a big need in current XaaS.”
JumpCloud DaaS promises to help organizations be more agile and more effective whether they’re just implementing a directory service, extending an on-premise directory service to the cloud, or migrating locally-managed directory services to the cloud.
A cloud-based DaaS offering makes sense. No matter what size an organization is, managing the user directory through local, manual processes is an obstacle to realizing the full benefits of other cloud services. It creates complexity, and introduces reliability and security issues. Cloud-based services need a cloud-based directory service—a directory service that can keep up in terms of availability, scalability, and flexibility.
JumpCloud DaaS—like other managed cloud offerings—takes the burden off of local IT to manage the backend of the directory services infrastructure, and places it on JumpCloud. Customers can focus on building things, and authenticate and authorize cloud infrastructure, servers, applications, users, and devices.
JumpCloud’s Directory-as-a-Service is available immediately. Pricing plans start at $10 per user per month, and the first ten users are free forever. JumpCloud supports the LDAP protocol and works with Windows, Mac, and Linux devices.