2021 Q1 Overview
Everyone gets enough email and social media spam. In the spirit of trying to lessen everyone’s burden, we’ve condensed our last three months of news into a single update.
Business Updates
IAM Cloud expands into the USA.
We recently created a US-based subsidiary, IAM Technology USA Inc, and set-up a new office in New York City. We already have teammates in the US in New York, Ohio and Utah as well as colleagues in South America. We’re working together to grow and evolve how we can best meet the needs of our clients and partners across the Americas. And within the next year we’ll be directing/redirecting all our North and South American custom through our US-based sub.
IAM Cloud expands into Europe.
We’re acutely aware of the uncertainties that Brexit brings, both in terms of trade and regulatory alignment with the EU. We’ve formed an Irish subsidiary IAM Software Europe Ltd which will eventually become our main trading hub for our customers across the EU, EEA and EFTA.
We’ve hired a CTO.
We talk to a lot of ridiculously talented people. In fact, we’ve hired a lot of ridiculously talented people. But sometimes you meet people who leave an impression on you that you can never shake. About 5 years ago we met a great guy who just understood IAM Cloud in a way that almost no one else ever quite has. Whose vision for the future of technology was almost-freakishly identical to our own. At that point in 2016, Adam (our Founder) and I said to each other “one day, when the time is right, we’re going to hire them”. And so, 5 years later we asked them to join us, and they accepted. We’re hugely proud to announce the hiring of a CTO to IAM Cloud: Robert (Rob) Allen. Rob is a fantastic technologist who has excelled in the fields of identity, migration, devops, service delivery, support management and across a range of technology stacks. Rob has had an impressive career, which among various accolades has involved working as a developer and technical advisor at Microsoft. Together with Rob, we’re going to transform our capabilities as a business when it comes to how we deliver our technology, and work with our customers and partners.
Our team has been growing.
We’ve continued to hire, and have managed to bring on board some truly world-class people. One of the benefits of being a remote company is that our search area is no longer tied to a physical office. We want the best people we can find regardless of postcode. Our latest recruits hail from Germany, Spain, Ireland and… the Midlands. Well of course, our UK home soil is still home to lots of great talent too 🙂
Legal updates.
Some of our terms are old, and not up-to-scratch with the company we are today. We’re working with our legal team to completely re-write all our legal documentation to ensure that they provide the best protections to us and both our customers and partners. We’re also creating a new home for our legal terms on our website to ensure we’re as transparent as possible. We’ll be making further announcements about this soon.
Company success.
This might sound contrived, but growth is not a priority for us this year. We see 2021 as a year of transformation for our company and technology. The year we free ourselves from some of the stifling legacies of our past. The year we finally release our new platform, which has been 4 years in the making. And the year we get all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed in preparation for next year. Still, we’ve been very lucky to have been growing anyway. We’ve lately broken our records on number of new free trials in a day (21), number of new partnerships in a month (17), new customers in a day (19), plus record website traffic and sales revenues. And since we don’t really do any marketing at the moment, this is nearly entirely off the back of our community of customers and partners spreading the word on our behalf. And for this we thank you greatly.
ISO 27001.
We were recently recertified as ISO 27001 compliant for information security management. And I’m happy to say we passed with no minors. Although I should say that ISO 27001 is just the starting point, rather than the end-goal.
Beyond ISO 27001.
Security has always been very high on our agenda, but lately we’ve been particularly active in looking at ways of strengthening it across our whole tech stack and business. We’re introducing a number of fantastic cybersecurity products into our cloud services to enhance security, as well as products aimed at better protecting our own team. We’ll also begin working towards SOC 2 compliance within the next year, and are likely to begin recruiting some additional dedicated team members focused around security management and AppSec.
Technology
Development progress.
We haven’t launched any public software releases yet in 2021, but that’s not for a lack of progress. We have had our heads down working on our new API, new Portal, IDx service, and we’ve made huge steps forward in the development of Cloud Drive Mapper “v3”.
We have spent nearly four years working on the complete greenfield rebuild of our tech stacks. It’s been important to us that we don’t just build technology that’s good for today, but that caters for our long-term future aspirations too. This has been a major undertaking, but we’re super proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far. While it has taken time, perhaps more time than we’d originally wanted, it’s because we have resisted temptations at every turn to take shortcuts. The level of detail and consideration in our new software is on a whole other level to anything we’ve created in the past.
Cloud Drive Mapper v2.
We have also been working on a few minor-to-moderate changes to Cloud Drive Mapper v2 (latest build 2.7.4.1). We still have a few releases to go with v2 before we begin the transition to v3. A key area of focus for now is with our converged drives. While SharePoint and Teams appear quite distinct from a UI perspective, the back-end relationship they have is quite tangled and messy. We’re aware of a few edge-cases which are not well supported by the current converged drives. In addition to closing those gaps, we’re also beginning to look at providing some greater controls for filtering converged drives to allow admins to define which Sites / Teams can be converged. And in general, we’re always looking for opportunities to make Cloud Drive Mapper as stable and resilient as possible and have a few updates that will help maximize the lifespan of v2.
We’ll have more updates on the upcoming releases to Cloud Drive Mapper in the coming weeks.
