I spend the majority of my work life talking about, evaluating, deploying, integrating, and generally using SaaS products. Tens a week. Hundreds a year. As someone who works at a Fintech these are vital tools to us and we need to choose the right combination to ensure our IT, and overall business, operations run as efficiently as possible.
Blessed, or perhaps cursed, with this knowledge I bring you the inaugural ‘That Workplace Tech Guy Awards 2024’! Check out the categories and this year’s winners below.
Disclaimer / Criteria
Disclaimer: this is all just based on my own opinion of products I’ve used and/or evaluated this year as part of my role. This is the express opinion of myself and not my employers. I am not being paid or otherwise influenced into choosing these products for the awards, this is my own honest, as-unbiased-as-a-human-can-be opinion!
Criteria: The first criteria is that I must have used, trialled, demoed, or done considerable research on the product. If that is true, I then am rating the products loosely based on the following criteria: ROI, innovation, performance, useability, integrations, and ‘other’. ‘Other’ being anything in particular that has caught my eye or impressed me about the company and/or product in question.
Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform of the year
Up first perhaps the most hotly contested category of them all: Mobile Device Management. As a macOS guy I’m leaning towards the Apple-oriented MDMs, especially considering the underlying MDM framework on macOS is, in my opinion, streets ahead of the Windows equivalent. The nominees are:
- Jamf Pro
- Jumpcloud
- Kandji
- Hexnode
- Mosyle
- Microsoft Device Management (aka InTune)
Expand to see the Winner!
Winner
Having added Assignment Maps this year, as well as generally being a really solid MDM, I can safely say Kandji is the best macOS MDM on the market. It’s super easy to set up, even easier to maintain once rolled out, and generally very performant. With the addition of Assignment Maps you barely even need to log in to the platform because you can manage assignments via Directory attributes e.g. if a user is added to a certain group in Okta/Entra/Google Workspace then grant them access to x additional tools / configs associated with that group in Kandji.
Whilst you can achieve similar in the other tools, Kandji just has the best approach in my eyes, and coupled with the overall simplicity of the product it comes out on top
Identity Access Management (IAM) of the year
Here we’re looking at how user lifecycle management is handled, how good the API is, and how well the product integrates with downstream apps.
- Okta
- OneLogin
- Jumpcloud
- Ping
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft Entra
Expand to see the Winner!
It’s going to take a lot to knock Okta off the top of my IAM list. For a start, I’ve been using it for the last 8 years and had a lot of success thanks to this product so I may be a little biased (but aren’t we all?).
However, I genuinely think it’s the best on the market. I’ve evaluated all the other options on the list and, while Okta generally comes up as one of the most expensive, it’s for good reason. The User Lifecycle Management is the best I’ve seen, Workflows are a very useful tool, the Directory is easy to use, it integrates with just about everything, and it has an excellent API with great documentation for anywhere it doesn’t happen to integrate with out of the box. Whilst I’d love to see an innovative new player, or huge development from someone else on the list, for now I can’t see Okta being beaten any time soon. A worthy winner in 2024, and likely many years to come.
Endpoint Protection product of the year
If I’d done this last year I probably would have gone with CrowdStrike. Whilst it’s still a great product (especially on macOS) I can’t put it anywhere near the list thanks to the slight snafu involving bricking somewhere around 8.5 million Windows devices. So let’s see who rose to the top in the chaos:
- SentinelOne
- Microsoft Defender
- Sophos
- ESET Protect
- FortiEDR
Expand to see the Winner!
Much like a lot of product categories in 2024 the solutions in this section seem to be converging and overlapping so much that there’s not a lot to choose between them. So why Microsoft Defender? It gets consistently high MITRE scores, a decent and easy enough to interface (especially for a Microsoft product!), simple to roll out on Windows and macOS, and just generally one of those products you can set up, sit back, and let it do the majority of the work for you. It just ticks all the boxes without adding unnecessary complexity and addons that some of the other products try to push on you. On top of that, it’s included in the higher end 365 products (E3 & E5) which you may already be paying for. I bet you didn’t think you’d see a Microsoft product win on this Mac guy’s blog huh?
Best value for money SaaS platform
In this category we’re really focussing on a combination of ROI and just the general cost to purchase the product in the first place. There’s swathes of cheaper and generally more niche SaaS apps on the market now that are definitely worth having a look at, some of which are included here:
- Pump.io – Autonomous Cloud Savings
- Prosper Ops – Autonomous Cloud Savings
- Venminder – Vendor Management Orchestration
- Drata – Compliance Automation
- Control D – Web Filtering
Expand to see the Winner!
A very tight race between PropsperOps and Pump.io for this one but ProsperOps comes out on top. Whilst they’re both great autonomous cloud savings tools ProsperOps is considerably easier to set up, has great dashboards, a superb team if you ever need assistance, and simple billing via AWS Marketplace where you’re only charged a percentage of what you save. I can see no reason why anyone wouldn’t want to use this product considering it literally pays for itself multiple times over.
Best SaaS platform – Other
This category is for other products of note that aren’t MDM, IAM, EDR, or cost-focussed. I’m mostly looking at well-built and intuitive products that have done exactly what they claimed to do, and more. The nominees:
- Tailscale – Software defined mesh VPNs
- Venminder – Vendor Management Orchestration
- Metomic – DLP
- Notion – Wiki, docs, and collaboration
- Control D – Web Filtering
Expand to see the Winner!
Whilst a little niche, this Vendor Management product is awesome. It orchestrates your entire Vendor Lifecycle Management including Due Diligence, Risk Assessments, Compliance Checks, Vendor Service Reviews and so much more. If you’re struggling with the Vendor Management area of your ISO, DORA, or other certifications then I’d strongly recommend you check them out.
And that wraps it up for 2024. Well done to all the nominees and winners. I hope everyone has a great festive period and a happy new year!
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