Fair Harbor Clothing uses innovative and soft performance fabrics made from recycled plastics and other materials (like discarded oyster shells). Their clothes look and feel like your cherished old garments — plus have the added benefit of cleaning up the beach.
Challenge
In 2021, Fair Harbor was an established brand with a small 5-person staff, poised to hire, grow, and professionalize operations. COO Allie Wightman faced challenges with new staff onboarding and managing company-owned workstations. For instance, when users added their personal Apple IDs to their Fair Harbor Macs, the company was effectively locked out from administration and redeployments.
Anticipating rapid growth, Allie knew the company needed better onboarding and offboarding policies, with a priority on security features like multi-factor authentication.
“We were moving to new offices, so it was a good time to make changes,” says Allie. “Macktez helped deploy a set of services to formalize user support and promote a secure, cloud-first technology strategy,” including Macktez Identity Management.
Solution
After a detailed initial assessment to understand Fair Harbor’s needs, goals, and budget, Macktez recommended a curated set of subscriptions to help manage various aspects of operations:
- Workstation Management for security policies and remote IT support.
- Backup Management to deliver point-in-time recovery options for all Google data.
- Network Management for rapid-response status reports on uptime and network performance.
- Domain Management to fortify email security and improve deliverability of outgoing communications.
But the unifying subscription recommended was for Identity Management, which centralizes user authentication across systems and devices; enhances security with multi-factor authentication and single sign-on for critical services; and streamlines user onboarding and offboarding.
Importantly, Fair Harbor’s customer data portal did not at the time have an option for multi-factor authentication, so federating that service to JumpCloud for authentication and enforcing JumpCloud Protect push notifications addressed an obvious cybersecurity risk.
As a hands-on administrator, Allie wanted her own access to view and, if necessary, manage user assignments. Since JumpCloud’s multi-tenant portal allows collaboration with client admins, Allie can take care of some tasks herself when needed, for example reassigning workstations from one user to another. “There is no downtime for me,” she says, since the flexibility to add a new user profile to a workstation is available for all devices bound to JumpCloud.
Results
With a staff of 20 today, Allie says that preparing for growth with Macktez’s support has been essential to the success of Fair Harbor. “Tying personal identities to machines would have made compliance impossible to manage,” she says. And even though contractors bring their own devices and maintain authority for those devices, Macktez recommended that all contractors also have an identity at JumpCloud to assign permissions to organization services to manage and enforce security and permissions.
Insurance companies are tightening their requirements for cybersecurity policies, but Fair Harbor can breeze through that renewal process with JumpCloud MFA enforced across the board.
Macktez provides security best practices with a variety of managed service subscriptions that give Fair Harbor key protections and an important degree of autonomy over its own operations.