17 Oct Onboarding and Offboarding: Challenges and Solutions for ‘High-Trust’ Companies

Onboarding and off-boarding employees can pose IT challenges for any small or mid-sized business, but particularly those in ‘high-trust’ sectors, where the company – and therefore, its employees – are responsible for sensitive data and information.

For law firms, financial services providers, accounting firms and the like, the question of who has access to specific company resources and client assets is of utmost importance. Not only is it crucial for newly hired employees to have the ability to hit the ground running with everything they need, but equally important is the ability to seamlessly control that access – adding access as their roles evolve and withdrawing access when they should no longer have it.

Here are just a few of the key considerations for ‘high-trust’ companies to consider when developing onboarding and offboarding processes:

Ensuring that new employees have access only to the company resources they need.

When onboarding new employees, it is essential to ensure that they have the necessary access to company IT resources, including email, applications, and data. This process may seem straight forward, but, in the world of corporate cybersecurity, the important Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) underlines the importance of limiting each employee’s access to only the data they need to do their jobs. Enabling and employing this kind of access control for your organization can be challenging, but it is important to make sure that new employees have everything they need to do their job effectively while keeping data secure.

One way to streamline the process is to create a checklist of all the access rules for different job types. This can help to ensure that nothing is forgotten and that the process is as efficient as possible. Integrating these kinds of checklists with a Single Sign-On tool –  an integrated authentication system that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any and all  necessary IT solutions -can help you find the balance between giving employees what they need to hit the ground running while limiting access to sensitive data.

Making sure that former employees no longer have access to company resources.

As every business owner knows, protecting company resources is essential for maintaining a competitive edge. This is especially true when it comes to proprietary information and confidential customer data.

When an employee leaves the company, it’s important to make sure that they no longer have access to these sensitive materials. Otherwise, they could exploit this information for personal gain or pass it on to a competitor.

The best way to protect company resources is to have strict policies in place for handling employee departures, along with software tools to remove access quickly. For example, an Identity Access Management (IAM) tool, combined with a Mobile Device Management (MDM) architecture can greatly simplify both onboarding and offboarding.

Managing the proliferation of devices that employees use to access company resources.

In today’s business environment, it’s not uncommon for employees to use a variety of devices to access company resources. From company-issued laptops and desktops to personal computers, smartphones, and tablets. While this can improve productivity, it can also create challenges for IT departments.

Conditional access – only allowing specific devices access to company resources – is a key component of a good cybersecurity program. With many different types of devices in use, it can be difficult to keep track of which should access to company data and resources. Additionally, managing, patching, and securing different types of devices can be costly.

As a result, it’s important for companies to have a clear policy for which devices should be authorized and prepare those devices for new employees when onboarding.

The Altourage Solution

A well thought out and executed system for onboarding and offboarding your employees can give new employees a positive first-experience, ensuring they have easy access to the proper resources and applications, and foreclosing the possibility of security breaches posed by employees that have left the company – or whose roles have changed.

Altourage’s comprehensive onboarding and offboarding services are developed to ensure security and efficiency and are trusted by clients in many ‘high-trust’ sectors.

Through our customized forms and use of best-of-breed tools, clients direct our team to prepare devices and user accounts to their specifications, ensuring the proper permissions, applications, and cybersecurity safeguards.

Our device management services are structured to help our clients keep their employees’ devices running smoothly and efficiently- making sure their teams maintain the highest levels of productivity. We securely configure their employees’ devices by sending profiles and commands to the device wirelessly. This includes updating software and device settings, monitoring compliance with organizational policies, and remotely wiping or locking devices if/when it becomes necessary.