Report: 87% of IT Leaders Moving to a Unified Platform

Recently, Google Workspace and JumpCloud collaborated on a joint research report on productivity suites among IT leaders.

IT teams pursuing consolidated platforms

According to the report, enterprise IT teams are seeking more innovative, consolidated platforms to address complexity and improve security.

Among the key insights from the report are:

• 87 percent of IT leaders would consider switching to a unified platform, while 54 percent are very likely to act.
• Only 6 percent of leaders enjoy a seamless productivity suite experience, while 28 percent rely on high-effort, high-cost workarounds.
• 36 percent face multi-device complexity, 34 percent face identity and access friction, and 34 percent face policy enforcement challenges.
• Over 60 percent of organizations reported gaps in multi-factor authentication (MFA) coverage, access governance, or device compliance.
• Do-it-yourself (DIY) unification fails for 58 percent of enterprises, even with add-ons or third-party tools.

While modern productivity suites claim to offer simplicity, the report indicates that enterprise IT teams don’t find this to be the case and that the current enterprise productivity landscape paints a different picture.

“Productivity suites function as the backbone of day-to-day operations, but keeping them running smoothly, especially when locked into legacy technology, requires continued oversight, policy tuning, and integration work across complex environments,” the report states.

This is emphasized in the report, which identifies just 6% of U.S. enterprise IT decision-makers who see a truly seamless productivity suite experience.

Productivity suites are increasingly difficult to scale

While productivity suites are indispensable for enterprise IT, they are becoming increasingly difficult to manage and scale.

IT teams have devoted valuable time to maintaining integrations, managing licences, and troubleshooting identity or device conflicts, rather than focusing on enabling innovation.

To break the cycle of complexity, IT leaders will focus on the next stage of modernization, which lies in unifying AI, collaboration, identity, and device management into a single control plane to remove layers of complexity that slow productivity and inflate costs.

New collaborations, like the one between Google Workspace and JumpCloud, launched in October, signify how the industry is shifting to simplify foundations rather than add to them.

Patchwork IT is proving costly, especially amongst Microsoft 365 users

Among MSPs, 70 percent say that Microsoft 365 requires more administrative time than Google Workspace. Meanwhile, only two percent of IT professionals have not explored alternatives to Microsoft.

Organization’s top three challenges with Microsoft 365, according to those surveyed:

• 45 percent said high overhead was a challenge.
• 44 percent said security configuration complexity.
• 40 percent said complex licensing and pricing.

Survey findings found that Google customers also face challenges, including multi-device management challenges (47 percent) and tool sprawl (43 percent).

“These issues are primarily operational rather than architectural and can be resolved by unifying device and identity management,” the report stated. “Recognizing these operational rather than architectural gaps, Google introduced the Work Transformation Set with JumpCloud to unify identity, device, and policy management under one control plane.”

During the next phase of enterprise IT, organizations that thrive will be those that stop patching complexity and design for unification, consolidating identity, devices, and policies under one cohesive model.

The state of the unification gap

Further, the report states that despite consolidation efforts, true end-to-end unification hasn’t been achieved by many, and most are operating a patchwork of connectors, manual syncs, and loosely coupled systems.

Roughly 58 percent of organizations report that their IT unification is unsustainable, and another 38 percent report that it only works with high ongoing administrative effort. Organizations manage an average of 9.3 tools across core IT, which raises costs, adds manual oversight, and increases risk exposure.

This unification gap persists due to multiple layers of policy and enforcement models that contribute to complexity and operational overhead.

Additionally, DIY unification – in the short term – can preserve continuity. Still, in the long term, it undermines resilience, and a unified operating layer for identity, device, and policy provides a more durable architecture.

“As a rapidly scaling fintech, we needed an IT stack that could keep up with our growth without sacrificing security or adding complexity,” said Renjith Radhakrishnan, head of IT business solutions at Tamara. “The collaboration between JumpCloud and Google Workspace has been a game-changer. We’ve cut employee onboarding time by 70 percent, eliminated manual password resets, and achieved 100 percent compliance across all our devices.”