Improved efficiency, better security posture with Jamf
Scrive
Stockholm, Sweden
Scrive is a rapidly growing global electronic signature and ID business. As is often the case, with rapid growth came new challenges. Scrive needed to scale their operations from eight to more than 100 remote employees around the world in a flexible and secure manner. Tim Ellis, Scrive's CISO found a solution that empowered them to do exactly that.
Scrive already had a security product in place, so Tim set out to put it to the test to see if what they had was sufficient. He discovered a myriad of product issues with their endpoint protection that resulted in significant productivity delays.
For instance, his mainly remote team was having trouble with their most basic task: getting an Internet connection. And with a team that was growing by leaps and bounds, Tim couldn't afford problems like this.
"Our biggest problem," says Tim, "was a captive portal Wi-Fi issue." If a team member attempted to connect to a public Wi-Fi connection, for instance, their endpoint protection would not allow them past the portal.
"When you have a mobile workforce of salespeople who need to go out and do things," added Tim, "they need to meet in coffee shops sometimes; you need to be able to connect to Wi-Fi networks."
Tim realized that their security solution was designed for Windows. Mac users were being treated as second-class citizens. According to Tim, "We wanted to be a first-class citizen on a platform built for Macs."
Apple-specific security and management solutions
"Onboarding with Jamf, we save upwards of a day per laptop."
Fortunately, Tim didn't have to look far to remedy the problem.
Scrive was already a Jamf Pro customer; Jamf Pro's zero-touch provisioning has been an enormous boon to the global company with a far-reaching workforce that was hiring aggressively.
Scrive CTO Tage Borg sees a big time and cost savings with onboarding new hires using Jamf.
"We save upwards of a day per laptop, as compared to provisioning manually," says Tage. "All we need to get a new employee up and running is to create a username and password."
Part of the decision to go with Jamf Pro in the first place was also Self Service: an on-demand app catalog that Scrive could populate with resources for employees.
"The decision to deliver Self Service help was a great one," says Axel Landberg, product owner at Scrive. "We have a small IT team that can't afford to spend time on distributing apps, nagging about updates, and directing users to different G-drives for documentation. I like that I have only one place I need to go make sure my software is up to date."
Scrive was also impressed with Jamf Nation, the world's largest Mac admin group. "You can access a big community behind Jamf," says Tim Ellis, "as well as the company itself."
And after a thorough feature comparison of different Apple management systems, "Jamf came out on top."
Jamf Protect for Mac endpoint security
Turning to Jamf for endpoint security protection only made sense.
"We were really happy to see that Jamf added malware prevention to Jamf Protect, and it was a deciding factor in our purchase," says Tim.
Making the transition from their former Windows-based endpoint security product to Jamf Protect went smoothly.
They installed the agent and moved a small group of people onto Jamf Protect directly as a test group. Developers, who clamored to get into the test group due to frustrations with their previous product, were incredibly happy with the speed at which they could perform builds — and they felt comfortable with the security the product afforded.
"We threw malware assets at the test group, and Jamf Protect successfully detected the valid threats, which was good," says Tim.
Despite having richer features than other endpoint protection solutions, Tim found the interface simpler than the competition.
Jamf Protect was the company's first experience in having an endpoint and detection response (EDR) solution which pointed them to interesting and possibly suspicious behavior with behavioral analysis beyond simple malware.
In particular, the analytics section of Jamf Protect has affected their entire security posture: "Being able to drill down into different things is very important," says Tim, "because it helps how you look at risk and how you're going to treat it in the future. When a company doesn't have the data available, it becomes impossible to plan for how to treat what might be coming. When you have individual metrics on these, it's easy to see how you're going to treat them."
This data has already improved Scrive's work. "It's made us think about ways to improve our security measures and we've gone in and targeted various system benchmarks to improve our security culture," says Tim.
Scrive hasn't had to do any remediation yet, but they're preparing for it. "If threats of certain types are detected," says Tim, "we'll leverage Splunk to put them into a Smart Group in Jamf Pro."
"I have noticed that my laptop is faster, and I don't get notifications that I need to update or to scan my computer in the middle of a presentation," says Alex Landberg, Scrive's product owner. "Fewer applications to keep track of helps me spend more time on my work."
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