Replace Microsoft® Active Directory®

You’ve outgrown Active Directory. That’s ok. Active Directory is a nearly 20-year-old technology built for homogenous Windows networks with everything on-premises.

Today’s modern IT infrastructure looks very different than even 10 years ago. Your employees are working on a variety of OSs: Windows, macOS, and Linux. They work via WiFi in remote offices, home offices, and on the road. Infrastructure is moving to the cloud (e.g. AWS) and organizations are adopting more SaaS solutions such as Salesforce, Box, Webex, and even replacing the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite with G Suite or Office 365. It’s time to make the leap to JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service®.

JumpCloud replaces Activity Directory with centralized identity management – all from the cloud. JumpCloud authenticates, authorizes, and manages employee identities with their machines, applications (cloud and on-premises), and networks. IT administrators have complete control over a wide variety of IT resources while dramatically improving security.

AcePayroll Case Study

Unifying IT Coast-to-Coast by Replacing Active Directory

This tutorial video demonstrates JumpCloud’s Groups in action.

Groups are exactly what their label implies: Groups of objects. We implemented this system to simplify the experience for admins and properly support a new association model (e.g. a graph model) between objects – something we feel will give limitless scalability to our directory architecture and model over time.

Let’s go through some basics:

–What are Groups?

Groups are collections of JumpCloud objects (e.g. a collection of users or systems). These group collections are then associated with other objects to form relationships between them.

The primary function of these relationships enables admins to grant or remove access to or from objects (e.g. a user associated with various resources) in a very efficient way.

–What kind of Groups does JumpCloud support?

Groups of Users – These are logical collections of users (employees). For example: “Sales Team” or “DevOps Team”

Groups Of Systems – These are logical collections of systems. For example: “Production Servers” or “Boulder Office Workstations”
–How do Groups Work?

NOTE: You can review our Getting Started with Groups here on our Knowledgebase: https://support.jumpcloud.com/custome…

Groups of Users principally drive the employee onboarding process. This Group object, containing specific types of employees (e.g. sales, marketing, engineering), is connected to other resources that class of employee need access to:

– Groups of Systems (typically servers – as personal machines are bound directly to the user)
– SSO Applications
– RADIUS Servers
– Directories (G Suite, Office 365 and LDAP)

When a Group of Users is associated to those associated resources mentioned above, an admin simply adds a user to give them access to those things or removes the user to take away access.

Groups of Systems contain any number or type of machines (physical or virtual). This Group object is important for the following reasons:

– They can be bound to Groups of Users to replicate the power of what Tags did (many users associated with many systems)
– They can be leveraged for DevOps purposes, primarily via the API as is done now with Tags to auto-scale virtual infrastructure.
– They can be leveraged to execute commands against en masse.