With the cloud becoming a dominant player in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the virtualization of servers taking over for specialized physical server hardware the market is becoming ever more complex when it comes to cloud management and configuration. To make life more simple for the operations side of DevOps, JumpCloud seeks to fill this niche with a powerful software solution.

JumpCloud develops an agent that eases cloud server management for IT departments and DevOps teams through monitoring, automation, management, and orchestration. By lightening the load when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of running servers in the cloud, JumpCloud makes it easier for developers to get to development. The idea comes from Rajat Bhargava, a veteran of the security sector, who is also the co-founder and CEO of the company.

Last week, JumpCloud, which was formerly known as SafeInstance, has closed a $3.1 million Series A round, according to paperwork the company has filed with the SEC. The funding is led by Bullet Time Ventures and Foundry Group. Rajat Bhargava said the Boulder-based firm plans to use the new capital to expand its sales and software engineering team–most importantly to boost server management automation.

“We truly believe in the significant value of our product, and this investment is a testament to the confidence in our vision and team,” said Bhargava. “Working closely with our customers, we have already made tremendous progress in the months since launching. Having the increased resources that this funding will provide allows us to accelerate our mission of automating the management of every server, everywhere.”

Enables IT to focus on innovation

As the featureset of the DevOps movement becomes more and more central, especially in startups where there is no clear distinction between developers and operations, businesses are finding themselves working with smaller teams and fewer human resources. In a company where most of the employees’ time is devoted to developing applications and services, who has the time to pay attention to the management and security of cloud servers?

With this in mind, JumpCloud’s DevOps automation solution is designed to help IT and DevOps achieve high levels of reliability, avoid unplanned downtime and manage development environments without disruption and delays.

JumpCloud as a SaaS tool that can act as agent for both physical servers (based on Linux) and the cloud servers. This automation tool is able to control servers and manage users, identify missing security patches, alert personnel in the event of attacks in progress, and verify any abnormal use of resources. In a production environment, JumpCloud can take over the management, maintenance, monitoring and security of the server and almost supplant a true dedicated systems integrator.

In addition, the server automation tool provides for the management of users and the security of an entire cloud infrastructure, minimizing the number of late night calls for technical errors or attacks and providing an environment easier to manage and more reliable for everyone.