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So you work in IT and your organization is growing quickly. The challenge you and your colleagues face is how to quickly onboard and offboard employees. With a rapidly growing user base, your organization will also have a wider variety of IT resources. All of those users will be asking for the IT resources they need to do their jobs. Mapping those users to the required IT resources is no easy task. Taking away access when they leave presents the same challenges.
Onboarding and Offboarding: The Old Way
A long time ago, the network was far simpler. With on-prem, Microsoft Windows-based systems, the path to onboarding and offboarding was straightforward. A user would be created within the core, authoritative directory service at the time, Microsoft Active Directory®. With the support of having a singular operating system platform, users could access virtually anything on the network.
Of course, if the resources weren’t Windows or on-prem, the onboarding process became more manual. Today, with over 90% of enterprises supporting Macs (2017), better onboarding and offboarding processes have become one of the top ways that IT admins can save time.
Onboarding and Offboarding: The New Way
Let’s not think of onboarding and offboarding as a problem. When optimized, the onboarding process is an opportunity to make your entire IT infrastructure run more smoothly. That means a lot more free time and less hassle for IT. Onboarding, at its best, is a breeze: efficient and mostly automated. A more seamless onboarding process is actually one of the single best things that can happen to an IT admin. That’s because onboarding lays the foundation for every single interaction with the new employee. Password resets, tech support, security breaches and beyond can be limited with proper onboarding.
From the user’s perspective, great onboarding means that there is less friction and frustration accessing the IT resources they need to get their job done. That means more productivity and less hassle, hopefully translating into a much happier user base.
The question, of course, is how to make efficient onboarding and offboarding happen in the modern IT era. Today, the entire user base isn’t on Windows. In fact, only one in five devices is Windows (Forbes). End users are leveraging Macs and Linux devices more than ever. Cloud infrastructure is a mainstay and enables IT organizations to eliminate their data centers. Web applications are replacing on-prem applications as well as just adding to the overall IT landscape. Today, there are web applications to help just about everybody do their jobs. Connecting all of those various platforms, providers, and different locations of IT resources is no easy feat. This is why the onboarding and offboarding problem has exploded.
Modern Solution: Cloud Directory
The good news is that there is a new category of cloud identity management platform called Directory-as-a-Service which is helping IT admins wrestle this problem to the ground. As a cloud directory service, the goal of this IDaaS platform is to securely connect users to the IT resources they need, including systems, applications, and networks regardless of location, platform, protocol, and provider. That’s a massive step up for IT organizations when trying to solve their onboarding and offboarding problems.
Videos, Guides, Contact Info, & Free Accounts
The video embedded above is an in-depth webinar on the subject of modern onboarding and offboarding solutions, featuring Alan Shimel of DevOps.com and Greg Keller, CPO at JumpCloud. We also have put together an ebook that’s designed as a guide to all the best practices and pitfalls for on and offboarding. You can download that for free here (email required).
If you have any questions about how a cloud-based directory could assist in your specific onboarding and offboarding needs, drop us a note. We’d be happy to walk you through it. If you want to experience how you can attack this problem with a modern cloud identity management solution, sign up for a free JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service account. Your first 10 users are free forever.
