Scott Nursten, CEO, ITHQ
Emerging vendor tips: IP Fabric and JumpCloud
IP Fabric first off, because network assurance as a concept is taking off. Networks have grown exponentially over the past two decades and, while there are vendor-specific management tools, such as Cisco’s management for Cisco and Juniper’s for Juniper, Extreme’s for Extreme, they only work well if you have that single vendor across your entire network. That model hardly exists today.
The truth is through acquisition, vendor switching, different commercial models, network sprawl and the changing whims of IT teams, you basically end up with a huge multi-vendor estate of networking equipment. This all-too-common scenario makes it extremely difficult to visualise networks effectively and confirm whether changes have had the desired outcome, particularly when thinking about large-scale complex routing or switching networks, and especially when you’re also dealing with multi-vendors. So yep, very excited about IP Fabric and our new MSP agreement with them. And I can’t talk about IP Fabric really without mentioning Backbox, because the two work so well together that we have built a unique network assurance and automation solution using them.
On the JumpCloud front, I think that people are very tired of Active Directory; actually, very tired of Microsoft and their subscription-scalping in general. The rip-off billing models and lack of portability sees businesses suffering when they’re tied into the Microsoft ecosystem; and it’s wearing thin. We are seeing a lot of clients jumping ship from there, looking for identity and access management platforms that provide more and give you a better experience for single sign-on, mobile device management and password management combined.
The JumpCloud team have focused on what really matters for businesses – the frictionless ecosystem of identity and access management. Simple things like, if you have JumpCloud Go on your endpoint, your biometrics can be used to identify yourself to websites and single sign-on portals, unlock your password manager and it provides a host of easy-to-auth functionality. Ease of use and the beneficial workflow aspects are huge. Also, the integration model they have with the likes of SentinelOne for example, (which is another product that we love), allows you to lock down users and devices if there’s security alerts on their endpoints.
Vendors that are thinking ahead to integrations in general I think will take off this year. I do feel like they’re just at the beginning of this journey and it’s going to ramp tremendously.
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