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Doug: Hi, Doug Cahill here again with Greg Keller from JumpCloud. Jumpcloud, CTO. Greg, good to see you again.

Greg: And you as well, Doug. Thanks for having me back.

Doug: You bet. Pleasure. Good to riff with you again on some really important topics. You know, at the end of the last video, I sort of noted that, boy, we just scratched the surface. And so, I'm really interested in hearing from you how you and JumpCloud really think about Directory-as-a-Service and also relative to Identity-as-a-Service.

Greg: What we've effectively built is a cloud-based authoritative source of identity. The expansive part of this, and you'll start to see the separation between IDaaS and DaaS. DaaS is sort of the meta. It is exactly, it's all encompassing of access control and identity management for devices, for networks, for applications, whether they're in the cloud or on premise, big differentiator.

It is a directory in its totality. That's what we are. One identity for all the resources, physical or virtual that an employee needs access to. Contrast that with IDaaS, we look at that generally speaking, Doug, as sort of a feature of Directory-as-a-Service. You would basically take IDaaS and roll that into our, again, sort of our meta capsulating concept of Directory-as-a-Service.

Doug: I want to learn more about DaaS use cases, right? Let me sort of frame it up this way. You know, suffice to say different organizations are at different stages of their cloud journey. And very often that adoption has been decentralized, right? It has been driven out of the line of business, often outside of the purview of IT and cyber teams, i.e., shadow IT. And so, there's this sort of readiness gap, right, where sort of cyber teams, ops teams, IT teams in the large are kind of backup heels in playing catch up.

And that's not sustainable. You know, most organizations are operating this reality, right, Harvard multi-cloud realities. And they need to go from sort of siloed approaches, separate teams, separate controls, separate environments to a unified approach. So, I'm wondering in that context where we got to close the gap and we need to get to a unified posture, how that applies to Directory-as-a-Service being able to unify identities across these disparate environments.

Greg: Our customers fall in exactly one of the three following camps. One, you're a born in the cloud company. You're 3 to 5 years old. There's nothing on premise except for stand-up desks. They more than likely are computing in AWS. And very likely they're using Google G Suite as their collaboration engine.

These are companies that don't have a lot of Microsoft experience. So, they typically will not choose Azure AD or Active Directory on premise in order to manage all that non-Microsoft infrastructure. So, we galvanize that. We tie all that single identity so that access control can go across all the infrastructure. The second and third are very similar to each other.

Much more mature companies. They are probably much larger in an employee populace. They both have instituted Microsoft Active Directory. The first being a company that is trying to lift and shift itself to the cloud. So, we have to help them migrate, let them keep Windows devices if they have a big populace of them, but again, tie it all together, so that there's one central place like what a directory is supposed to do.

Frankly, what AD was doing for them, albeit with a patchwork of different tools to tie things into that sort of, their domain controllers. And the last are companies that they're foundationally wrapped around the axle of AD, which is a good thing for them. They're much bigger companies, but they are also looking to acquire and provide non-Microsoft solutions to their employees.

And how can we more elegantly connect those guys to those domain controllers, which we also can do? But the theme across all of them, Doug, is getting to cloud is fundamental for them.

Doug: Yeah. Greg, you know, that reminds me of, you know, some fundamental tenets of IT. You know, one is, it has been and will continue to be a heterogeneous mix of all of the things, you know, the infrastructure, the environments, and the apps, right? And that's partly born out of the fact that customers want optionality and the more that IT becomes decentralized in the lines of business are making those calls, the more heterogeneous it's going to be.

And therefore, there's a need for unification. It sounds like a big value prop around Directory-as-a-Service is sort of acknowledging and embracing it as a heterogeneous world and, you know, enabling that sort of level of optionality, that flexibility the customers want to use the environments, and the apps, and the services that they want to run their business while unifying for more operational efficiency.

Greg: Absolutely. And it's brilliantly said. I mean, our obligation to, you know, the IT professional is to create a very stable foundation, so no matter what they need to produce, or provide, or buy and satisfy their employees with, a Directory-as-a-Service has to be able to accommodate that.

So, I mean, at the end of the proverbial day, you know, making sure we provide a level of independence for customers or a proper Directory-as-a-Service should be doing is for that explicit use case.

Doug: Hey, Greg, once again, really enjoyed the conversation and, boy, we're just scratching the surface on this video. So, let's do this again soon.

Greg: Would love to. Thanks again for the opportunity.