Streamlining new hire onboarding and employee lifecycle management with BambooHR integration

A Human Resources Information System (HRIS) is like the main hub for handling important events related to employees in an organization. It covers various processes such as hiring new employees, giving promotions, managing temporary leaves, and handling employee exits. In the absence of automation, these processes depend heavily on manual input to progress. This manual reliance leads to wasted time on repetitive tasks and delays in new employees’ productivity. Moreover, there is an elevated security risk due to potential human errors.

Our new integration with BambooHR provides organizations with an additional option for efficiently managing the entire employee lifecycle. From onboarding new hires and managing promotions to handling temporary leaves and offboarding, customers are enabled to initiate, track, and manage HR-related events within a single, unified platform in a timely manner. It also helps to eliminate the need for manual data entry and reduce the risk of data discrepancies or errors and helps to maximize their efficiency and reduce the need for manual intervention, ultimately saving time and resources. Experience BambooHR native integration interactive demo video now!

“I can guarantee that someone has access to what they need on day one or when they transition to a new role. Employees have what they need faster than ever.” 
_{– Steve Foley,  Senior IT Automation Engineer at Seismic
Read our case study}

Schedule your on-demand workflows, then we will handle the rest!

With the new scheduled on-demand workflows, organizations are provided with the flexibility to initiate workflows at specific times. IT is enabled to schedule the full on/offboarding workflow to run on whatever date makes sense for their organization – whether that is the start date, today’s date, or somewhere in between. By leveraging automation, your IT teams can set and forget, focus on driving innovation and productivity. Experience our new Scheduled On-Demand Workflows demo video now! 

Complex Array support for extended triggers

With the enhanced ability to use data within complex arrays in extended triggers, customers now have the option to initiate workflows from a variety of providers, supporting a wider range of event formats.

What’s next: more flexible workflows with Branching

At BetterCloud, we prioritize innovation and strive to provide increased business value to our customers. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce the upcoming IF/Else branching feature. This feature empowers IT teams to consolidate workflows and paths, apply conditions based on specific scenarios, and unlock new levels of flexibility. By leveraging this capability, businesses can achieve highly dynamic, efficient workflows that optimize processes and resource utilization. For BetterCloud customers, please contact your Customer Success Manager to gather further information on incorporating branching once it becomes available.

To thrive as future IT leaders, it is imperative to prioritize business innovation and process redesign. The 2023 State of the CIO survey highlights that 55% of participants actively engage in identifying business opportunities and providing technology and provider recommendations. As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, BetterCloud remains at the forefront, providing innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of modern IT management to drive ROI, maximize operational efficiency, and achieve business outcomes.

Discover how our comprehensive solutions can eliminate up to 78% of your SaaS management work. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to streamline your operations and unlock the full potential of your IT automation. Schedule a demo today!

Gaining Executive Buy-In

In order to gain executive buy-in to bring BetterCloud into BARK, Grossman calculated how long it took to onboard or offboard an employee manually at the precise moment it needed to be done. In order to complete all these tasks, he would require an additional full time employee on his team. This calculation proved true. BARK saved 2,747 hours of IT time using BetterCloud workflows to automate manual tasks.

“If you’re going to hire more people, it’s going to be a strain on your budget. BetterCloud can make life easy for everybody.”

Elliott explained how streamlining manual tasks with BetterCloud didn’t just satisfy IT needs. The executive team was pleased with the financial savings and the compliance team was relieved to have confirmation that users were being deprovisioned appropriately and in an automated system that avoids human error. Finally, the IT team was building capacity, without building headcount and getting time back to work on strategic projects and improve their knowledge in new areas.

Focusing on Security

Beyond automating manual IT tasks, BARK’s IT organization was focused on security compliance and combating shadow IT within the company. During the webinar Grossman explained that shadow IT occurs when a department invests in an application and manages it themselves, without the approval or knowledge of IT. 

As a public company with compliance top of mind, the IT team needs to ensure these applications are offboarded as well. However, IT often doesn’t have admin rights to these apps. With BetterCloud’s offboarding workflow, IT is able to automate an email that will get sent to the app admin saying that an employee has been terminated, and requests confirmation that access has been revoked. “We have passed compliance every single time on applications we don’t even have our hands in,” said Grossman.

Up-Leveling IT with Expanded Capacity

As an IT leader, Grossman takes on great responsibility for his team, ensuring they are building skills to advance in their career. So what did he have them do with all of their time saved? Gain knowledge in other areas of interest, participate in training, earn certifications, and become proficient through broader IT experiences.

“I want my team to succeed. Denying the opportunity for professional development hurts career growth and makes employees less valuable in the long-term,” Grossman said.

On a personal level, Grossman takes pride in making sure automations are compliant to pass audits, saving his team time, saving the company money, removing the need to hire additional headcount, and retaining the existing talent on his team of three by making sure they enjoy their work. 

“Right now BARK has over 800 employees. I’ve seen the company grow from 300 all the way up. Being able to keep the amazing people on my team around as we scale is key for me,” said Grossman.

Watch the webinar recording here to learn more about the BARK IT automation story.

Ready to learn more about BetterCloud? Request a demo with a BetterCloud product expert today.

A robust user life cycle management (ULM) strategy is essential for retailers to streamline this process and alleviate the burden on IT resources while enabling business productivity and a healthy HR-IT relationship. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of automating ULM with BetterCloud for IT teams supporting retail seasonal staffing.

Five Benefits of Automated User Lifecycle Management for IT Teams Supporting Retail Seasonal Staffing

1. Streamlined Onboarding and Offboarding Processes: Automated ULM solutions simplify user account provisioning and deprovisioning, reducing administrative overhead and saving time during seasonal hiring in retail.
2. Enhanced Productivity and Reduced Friction: A well-implemented ULM strategy, supported by automation, improves seasonal worker productivity by ensuring seamless access to systems and applications in the retail industry.
3. Mitigated Security Risks: Automated ULM systems enforce consistent access controls and permissions, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches during retail seasonal staffing.
4. Optimized IT Resource Utilization: Automated ULM solutions optimize IT resource utilization by streamlining processes, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and proactive security measures during retail seasonal staffing.
5. Improved Collaboration and Reputation: Efficient ULM strengthens collaboration between IT teams, human resources, and business leaders, building trust and credibility in retail seasonal staffing initiatives.

Streamline Seasonal Staffing with BetterCloud User Lifecycle Management

The rising importance of HRIS (Human Resource Information System) as the source of truth for employee data underscores the need for IT automation to align with the schedules of Human Resources (HR) and the broader business. By integrating systems, such as Workday and BambooHR, seamless connectivity is established between IT systems and the authoritative source of employee information. This integration ensures that IT automation operates on the schedule dictated by the business, creating a cohesive and efficient workflow ensuring business productivity.

BetterCloud not only eliminates manual errors and accelerates processes but also provides pre-built workflows and templates specifically tailored to retail use cases. This approach enables IT automation to onboard seasonal employees, address mid-lifecycle system changes and offboard seasonal employees, by seamlessly integrating into the schedule set by HR and the business.

In addition to aligning with schedules, BetterCloud prioritizes security and compliance, offering scalability, flexibility, and enhanced collaboration between IT teams and other departments, particularly during high-demand periods such as retail seasonal staffing. Leveraging their extensive expertise and experience in managing user lifecycles, BetterCloud has successfully identified 62 million content violations and discovered 883,000 applications while overseeing more than 3.8 billion assets.

Executing over 7 million actions and 3.4 million workflows monthly, BetterCloud consistently saves thousands of hours for its 1,000+ clients. By improving IT productivity and driving increased business value, BetterCloud exemplifies the value of IT automation operating in sync with the schedules and seasonal needs of retail businesses.

Starting and Maturing User Lifecycle Management

BetterCloud User Lifecycle Management is the optimal choice for retail organizations preparing for seasonal staffing. Leveraging BetterCloud’s retail-friendly features, automation capabilities, robust security measures, scalability, and enhanced collaboration, IT teams can efficiently manage the user lifecycle of temporary workers during periods of seasonal staffing, significantly reducing – and in some cases eliminating – the burden of repetitive, low value work on IT organizations. BetterCloud streamlines processes, maximizes productivity, and ensures seamless integration of seasonal staff into the digital infrastructure. BetterCloud has enabled thousands of customers to automate user lifecycle management tasks. As the leading SaaS Management Platform (SMP), BetterCloud has built a path to operational excellence and agility that helps organizations accelerate their IT automation maturity for the greatest operational efficiency and IT agility. Get started by assessing your own User Lifecycle Management maturity today.

Read on to learn:

• Overall productivity improvements your IT team gets from using a SaaS management platform
• How adding automation muscle becomes a true force multiplier in user lifecycle management
• How starting now pays off fast 

Take productivity to new heights

With an average of 130 SaaS apps, effective SaaS management is more important now than ever. 

Thanks to countless, never-ending user lifecycle tasks needed for protecting the ever-growing expanse of sensitive data, the effort for managing it all is accelerating.

With proper user lifecycle management and security controls in place, organizations can then:

• Maximize operational efficiency 
• Accelerate employee productivity 
• Scale IT impact

To achieve these benefits, organizations across all industries and sizes now rely on SaaS management platforms – capable of automation and purpose-built for IT, of course.

But just how much does this crucial technology benefit?

Let’s first consider two important data points:

1. 93% of BetterCloud customers say the primary business benefit of a SaaS management platform is improved operational productivity
2. By adopting a SaaS management platform, on average, customers experience a 49% increase in overall IT productivity

Such improvement results from getting the most out of a SaaS management platform. In fact, organizations that enjoy the highest levels of improved productivity automate routine tasks like user lifecycle management, as well as day-to-day operational tasks like app access requests or password/MFA resets to essentially create self-service portals for end users.

If your IT team faces these challenges, then, the sooner you adopt a SaaS management platform, the faster you benefit. 

To convince you, we’ll go into how a SaaS management platform impacts user lifecycle management, a key SaaS management task.

Improve productivity with automated user lifecycle management – while boosting security

Of course, boosting productivity means saving time, which then translates to saving money. 

Let’s look at how.

In BetterCloud research conducted in spring 2023, SaaS management platform users with a few hundred employees save about 1,700 hours – about 82% of a full-time team member – by automating user lifecycle management alone. 

Of course, it’s important to remember that time spent for onboarding and offboarding varies based on the actual numbers of employees added and removed from corporate resources. 

Thus, for a big company with thousands of employees, automating user lifecycle management will save that company many, many thousands of hours.

So now, time to examine the broader business case for a SaaS management platform.

Automating user lifecycle management delivers significant IT productivity gains

Let’s revisit the scenario of a company with approximately 300 employees. Specifically focusing on the offboarding process, let’s examine organizations that have already completed nearly all of it.

With 18% turnover, we assume that it takes 3 hours to offboard one employee, and over the course of a year, it requires 162 hours to complete the same, error-prone, boring tasks to offboard all departing users.

In conservative estimates of dollars and cents, an organization loses $10,000 worth of time in offboarding tasks that could be automated.

And that’s not all. 

In many cases, IT must onboard every replacement for departed users. And that’s another $10,000 of valuable time lost to the same old, error-prone manual tasks. 

Now, we’re up to a conservative estimate of $20,000 in time spent on onboarding and offboarding tasks that could be automated.

So, if your company struggles to provide Day 1 onboarding, find the right IT skills, or wants to provide a better IT employee experience, then automating using a SaaS management platform will provide big productivity gains. 

How, then, does the business case change when adding other benefits?

SaaS license reclamation and security strengthens the business case

As part of performing the actual lifecycle management tasks, IT must reclaim and redeploy all SaaS licenses. After all, an asset is only productive when it’s in use. 

In addition,  in order to ensure maximum security, IT must perfectly perform all manual steps. However, nothing, except automation, guarantees a mistake-free offboarding.

SaaS license waste is too high.

By failing to completely offboard a former user, SaaS license waste is bound to occur. 

Unused, unproductive licenses are an enormous cost, and we’ll illustrate it with an example.

If you pay $40 per month of 162 dormant licenses, then in just two months, you’re losing nearly $13,000. Over the course of a year, left untouched, those license fees mount, needlessly costing you almost $80,000.

Once again, unproductive SaaS licenses highlight the need for a SaaS management platform.

Security risk reduction makes the business case a slam dunk. 

One more cost heightens the need for a SaaS management platform now – security. 

After all, despite the best intentions, manual offboarding is a haphazard process and mistakes are easily made. And when they happen, former users can retain access to your apps and data, introducing enormous risk until the mistake is uncovered and corrected. 

Too many times, manual offboarding mistakes don’t surface until there’s a breach, and breaches are very, very expensive.

Using the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report data, the average cost per breach per employee is $3,553. 

To be conservative, let’s estimate that it’s only $353 in per employee breach costs. A single breach from erroneous manual offboarding will cost that company of 300 employees more than $100,000.  

If we take that initial Verizon estimate of $3,553 into consideration, then a single breach could cost more than a million dollars. 

Thus, for risk reduction alone, your company needs a SaaS management platform now.

But for user lifecycle management alone, total up the potential:

• IT productivity boost
• Elimination of unproductive SaaS licenses
• Risk reduction

You can’t help but conclude that the costs of delaying automating with a SaaS management platform are simply too high and impede productivity.

You Need a SaaS Management Platform Now, Not Later

The costs of inaction are steep, particularly considering that a SaaS management platform is quickly operational. In fact, about 90% of customers are operational in less than 6 weeks. 

In addition, more than half of SaaS management platform users start seeing value in less than one month. 

The secret behind the speedy deployment and time-to-value is BetterCloud. 

BetterCloud’s easy-use, no-code workflow engine offers IT teams a quick way to start automating processes. To get your workflows off and running, there’s also: 

• An award-winning professional services team 
• Free on-demand training videos
• Live training and workshops

For initial deployment, a dedicated team of implementation specialists provide hands-on, tailored services and best practices from hundreds of successful engagements.

Operating without a SaaS management platform has a high cost, and with BetterCloud’s quick deployment and time-to-value, waiting doesn’t make sense. 

You need, and should, implement a SaaS management platform. Now. Request a demo.

We talked to Wolf about the challenges the Gainsight IT team experienced, the value the team has realized since implementing BetterCloud, and advice he would give others looking to automate routine tasks.

What challenges were you facing that led you to explore a SaaS management platform?

Nearly everything in IT was a manual process. I saw a demo of BetterCloud and thought this is what we need to manage our core applications and remove a lot of the manual labor.

What goals were you trying to achieve with a new solution?

Consistency and long-term stability.

What are the main use cases you’re solving with BetterCloud?

User lifecycle management (ULM). The most noticeable use case is offboarding. Each exit was very time consuming. You have to be methodical. You have to make sure you’re doing everything right and completing certain steps. There is great value in being able to not just cut access to apps, but to automate the migration of data from a departed employee to their manager.

As we continue to grow, we needed to onboard employees in a way that they were ready to go on day one. Going from office based to remote-first, we’ve had to figure out how to reconfigure and refocus. BetterCloud allows us to be nimble. It helps us in keeping things organized.

How has automation provided value to you and your team?

Automation really frees you up in a lot of different ways that are appreciated. You sleep a little better at night knowing that when the offboarding workflow is kicked off, all the things that need to happen have happened. I used to spend a lot of time going back through our spreadsheet and double checking to make sure that things that were checked off as completed actually happened. Sometimes you’d find they didn’t because someone wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing.

BetterCloud eliminates a lot of the errors that are bound to happen with humans doing the work and has saved us tons and tons of time.

Which blind spots in your processes has BetterCloud uncovered for you?

There were BetterCloud best practices we weren’t doing. There were certain steps that you miss sometimes because it wasn’t part of your main checklist, like transferring group ownership or secondary calendars. There’s tons of details that BetterCloud recommends because they help other companies set up automations so frequently. There are a lot of things they could streamline for us that we had overlooked.

How has BetterCloud helped your SaaS environment remain secure?

One of the nice things with BetterCloud is the visibility to see how many files are shared publicly and who owns these files. What we discovered was that a lot of people who had left the company had their files transferred to employees who had no idea they were shared publicly. Being able to recognize the risk, communicate what’s happening, and remediate the issue provides security.

What advice would you give others looking for a similar solution?

Look at your IT stack and if you are using SaaS apps, then BetterCloud is a no-brainer.

You can read the case study here.

If your business is still onboarding new hires the analog way, your IT staffers are likely dreading the onslaught of data they’ll be manually adding to your system. An average company’s SaaS stack these days is about 130 apps; even for a handful of new hires, that’s a tremendous amount of work for IT. You didn’t hire them to do data input! They’d be a lot happier (and useful to your company) if they could be deployed as strategic problem-solvers instead. 

Happy employees tend to stick around. When employees stick around, they’re likely to move within the company, needing to request access to new logins and clearances since IT first onboarded them. This could mean a lot more work for IT. Same goes for when a staffer finally leaves, when identity and access must be terminated or passed on to whoever’s taking over. But all this could be handled by IT in just a few clicks, with virtually zero chance of error. 

Below, we’ll explain how this process of user lifecycle management can be optimized into an automated process… and a huge win for your IT department. 

What exactly is user lifecycle management?

All the IT processes involved with an employee joining, moving within, or leaving your organization fall under the umbrella of user lifecycle management. To onboard and offboard users, or to apply mid-lifecycle changes—promotions, for instance—that’s the basis of ULM. 

During these procedures, IT has to create user accounts, and assure the staffers associated with those accounts have proper role based access until the day they leave the company. Managing user lifecycle is an ongoing process further complicated by the past several years in workplace trends. 

How a SaaS-filled workplace makes user lifecycle management so complex

Back when SaaS usage was still in its infancy, it was plausible to tackle user lifecycle management the old-fashioned way, without any automation. But SaaS workplace usage has exploded over the past several years. Worth repeating: the average SaaS stack contains about 130 apps, and there’s a good chance that number increases in coming years. The more apps in play, the more users IT has to create, the more access management for IT to handle. More tickets, more open tabs… you get the picture. 

We wish we could say IT departments are growing at the same rate, but that’s just not the case. These days, IT is being asked to be as lean and economical as possible. Fortunately, resources exist that can give IT departments of all sizes a huge leg up in access control.

Why automation is so important in modern user lifecycle management

The key to empowering your IT department is automation. User provisioning is a huge time sink for IT when done the analog way, and automation will also eliminate the costly human errors that come from tasking your team with data input all day. 

It’s a win-win, not to mention the benefits that will spread to the rest of your staff. Employees will appreciate not having to worry about their logins and app access, and they’ll get used to doing their jobs alongside an IT staff that’s freed up to help them perform better, rather than one that’s always bogged down with tickets and wait times. 

The benefits of automating onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle changes

For a company with over 200 employees, manual user onboarding takes an average of six hours per new hire, and seven for offboarding a departing worker. The benefits of allowing a high-profile new hire to hit the ground running on their first day are obvious. No IT company wants to be known for how long everyone is always waiting around for their logins or laptops. Unsurprisingly, there’s a major correlation between automated onboarding and employee retention. 

Here’s an example of how the onboarding process can be automated, kicked off by a Google Form submission:

Offboarding presents another set of challenges. IT must assure that any crucial data accrued by the outgoing staffer, as well as any logins or key responsibilities, are passed along to their manager and not lost in the shuffle. Security risk is another concern. Whether an employee left on good terms or not, you can’t leave any loopholes allowing them to still have access to your tech stack. Automated workflows can offboard an employee in one fell swoop, revoking their access and redistributing all relevant data immediately. (For a deeper dive on data breaches during offboarding and how automation can help, click here.)

Here’s a look at how the entire offboarding process can be automated, triggered by a ticket request in Jira:

Mid-lifecycle changes can even be done in bulk. Aside from your typical promotions and team transfers, automation is particularly valuable during mergers and acquisitions. Let’s say a smaller company that uses WebEx is acquired by a larger company that uses Zoom. Using automated user lifecycle management, IT could quickly assemble an automated workflow that creates Zoom accounts based off the existing WebEx accounts, then deletes those WebEx accounts to cut costs. 

Why you should automate user lifecycle management in a SaaS management platform

For setting all this automation into motion, several options exist, including SaaS management platforms (SMPs), information platform as a service (iPaaS), and identity as a service (IDaaS). However, options like iPaaS and IDaaS are best suited to automating much more basic tasks, like sending a Slack message. 

SMPs—like BetterCloud—on the other hand, were purpose-built to ingest metadata to make each action within a complex workflow extremely simple. For IT teams that manage multi-SaaS environments, BetterCloud user lifecycle management streamlines and automates the process of onboarding, mid-lifecycle, and offboarding SaaS application access and entitlements. Unlike identity and access management solutions that require manual intervention and custom scripting, or IT service solutions that generate tickets to be manually worked, BetterCloud’s granular, powerful automation and unlimited customizable workflows complement your IAM and help desk automation to improve IT efficiency by reducing up to 78% of SaaS management work.

For onboarding and offboarding—and everything in between—BetterCloud can help your company reap major dividends right away. Seismic, a San Diego-based sales enablement company with over 1,500 employees, reported saving 860 hours in one year after implementing BetterCloud to automate its ULM workflows. Regardless of your company’s size, the benefits are there for the taking.

To see BetterCloud in action, schedule a demo today. 

In our 2023 State of SaaSOps survey, we interviewed 700 IT practitioners of all levels about their challenges, how they measured their work, and their plans for the coming year. You can read many of our findings and download the report at stateofsaasops.bettercloud.com.

In this blog post, we take a closer look at the data to get a sense of the “state of the help desk” in 2023. SaaS management and user lifecycle management present a number of challenges, and many are shared by senior IT management (CIOs and VPs), mid-level managers, and individual contributors. But when it comes to measurement and metrics, there were some clear differences in the priorities of each.

Consistently managing app configurations throughout the user lifecycle is a top challenge for everyone

No matter what their job title was, the top challenge respondents needed to solve was being able to consistently manage app configurations. It makes a lot of sense, as SaaS stacks just keep getting larger—up to an average of 130 apps in 2022. Provisioning numerous accounts and ensuring sure employees have the right level of access can be extremely time consuming and error prone with all those open tabs.

File-sharing apps are a particular headache, as they have so many different file, user, and group settings. Getting them right for every new employee (or employee who is moving internally) can lead to endless open tabs and numerous tickets when configurations and permissions need to change. 

This is why it’s so important to equip your IT team with a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud. Deep integrations with the apps in your stack enable you to use one central location to update configurations across numerous accounts. You can also create automated workflows to make changes and updates automatically, such as when a new employee joins the company.

Senior IT leaders need visibility; other IT team members want to automate more tickets

After managing app configurations, the next most important challenges senior IT leaders needed to solve were related to visibility. The second-highest ranked challenge senior IT leaders faced was getting visibility into all user activity, data files, and folders, and a very close third was knowing all SaaS apps in use. 

When a SaaS stack grows large enough, visibility becomes a major problem. Shadow IT usage proliferates for many reasons, including well-intentioned employees just trying to be more productive. However, this leads to company data being left in multiple locations, especially if several different file-sharing apps are in use. It’s no surprise that senior leaders continue to struggle to get a complete picture of their environment.

The second-most important challenge to solve for IT individual contributors and mid-level IT managers was more closely related to their day-to-day operations: they want to automate more SaaS management tasks and help desk ticket resolutions. This makes sense, as the rise of remote work and increase in app usage has led some help desks to the point of meltdown.

A SaaS management platform like BetterCloud offers several ways for IT teams to solve their challenges with visibility and automation. An SMP’s no-code workflow builder can create zero-touch automations with ease, providing a way to reduce the number of tickets that need a manual response by 50% or more. The centralized visibility offered by an SMP also gives IT a more complete picture of their environment, including apps being accessed by OAuth.

Senior IT cares about customer satisfaction, but other IT staff just want to reduce the number of tickets

When it came to the most important measurements and metrics, there were clear differences between senior IT leaders and the rest of their IT teams. In many ways, their priorities reflect how their roles are evolving to meet today’s challenges.

In our survey, we found that senior IT leaders found that customer satisfaction as shown by their Net Promoter Score was their first most important metric. The second-most important metric was mean time to resolution (MTTR), or how fast a ticket was resolved. In today’s help desk, leaders are placing a priority on resolving issues quickly to accelerate employee productivity. 

For the other levels of IT, their #1 metric was reducing the number of help or service desk tickets. Today’s IT teams are very focused on “getting to zero” in the ticket queue. With tools like SMPs, the perennially elusive zero ticket queue has gotten much closer in reach, with its ability to automatically resolve incoming help desk tickets.

Conclusion

During these lean economic times, IT is being pushed to be more efficient in an attempt to save costs and boost bottom lines. Shadow IT, endless ticket queues, and consistently configuring an ever-increasing tech stack have become top of mind challenges for today’s help desks. It’s now more critical than ever to equip your IT team with the platform they need to address and overcome these challenges— without adding headcount.

SaaS management platforms, with their robust, easy-to-use automation engines can be a force multiplier for IT. They enable IT to automate up to 78% of their SaaS management tasks, including user lifecycle management and help desk ticket resolution. To learn more about how an SMP like BetterCloud can transform your help desk, schedule a demo today.

During some of the more public, large-scale layoffs, some companies struggled with offboarding. These haphazard, rushed processes left companies vulnerable to security risk, disrupted business operations in a major way, and created a chaotic experience for departing employees. 

How do these offboarding mistakes get made? Often it’s due to IT getting overwhelmed from getting multiple requests all at once, without the right tools to automate and streamline employee offboarding. Sometimes, organizations do have processes in place to meet regulatory compliance measures like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. 

However, these offboarding activities are often overly focused on security and access restriction, which can lead to disruptions in business continuity. For example, access can be revoked too soon, before resource ownership can be transferred or backed up. Then, valuable data could end up inaccessible without IT intervention—or worse, gone for good.

While layoffs are no one’s idea of a good time, they can still be done in a way that delivers a more positive, seamless experience for both the departing employees and those that remain. In this article and demo video below, we’ll discuss three commonly overlooked offboarding activities, and how to incorporate them into a fully automated offboarding process in a SaaS management platform.

Time your offboarding according to each employee’s time zone

Today’s remote workplace means that “standard working hours” is a much more complex concept. Where someone is based determines their working hours, so your offboarding process needs to be able to start on-demand, during the right local time for each employee. 

Otherwise, poorly timed offboarding could become a major business disruptor. For example, you don’t want to be the IT team who cuts off access in the middle of an important meeting during an employee’s last day, just as they are transitioning and transferring important business knowledge. 

Employees should also be notified clearly, in advance, when their access will be terminated, so they can plan their remaining time at the company accordingly.

In situations where large amounts of employees are being offboarded, you should take the time to ensure your processes take into account each employee’s local time zone and last day plans.

With BetterCloud, you can create on-demand, automated offboarding processes that start with a single click in Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta, Azure AD, OneLogin—or even as soon as a ticket is submitted in an ITSM like Jira. Offboarding workflows that revoke access should be started, for example, when an employee has their final manager meeting to prevent any interruption to work activities.

Not sure what steps should go into an offboarding process? Read our Ultimate Checklist to plan accordingly based on your SaaS stack. Want to save your helpdesk the trouble of automating their clicks to schedule offboarding? Read our advanced guide on how to schedule Org Unit changes in Google Workspace via Apps Script.

Don’t forget to transfer employee data

Many offboarding policies and processes simply revoke access and stop there. If your organization hasn’t defined a repeatable process to handle a departed employee’s data per application when they leave, you could be losing access to important business data.

Your automated offboarding process should do more than restrict access and delete accounts.

With a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud, your offboarding workflow can include steps to transfer ownership of resources like calendar events, files, projects, and more to the departing employee’s manager. 

SaaS apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Smartsheet, Zoom, PagerDuty, and Box all support the automated transfer of asset ownership. By incorporating steps to transfer resource ownership into your automated offboarding workflow, you won’t have to bother IT for access later, or worse, find out that business-critical, archived work was lost when an account was deleted.

Check for files shared with personal email accounts

When offboarding a departing employee, it’s important to ensure they do not retain access to contacts, email, messaging, and documents—especially when those assets may contain sensitive information. Some SaaS apps restrict access to data behind an active login, so in those instances, revoking access will keep the data stored inside safe after the employee departs.

Other apps like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 allow an employee to share access to their files with personal accounts. Employees may have done this out of convenience, so they could work from another device or location. Less scrupulous employees could be planning to use these assets to help them at their next employer. In either case, making sure their files aren’t being accessed by personal or other unauthorized accounts is an important part of offboarding.

BetterCloud allows your team to use a file grid view to quickly review all documents created by an employee, to see if they have been shared with personal email accounts.

In a couple of clicks, your team can revoke access to those resources, keeping proprietary and sensitive data safe. Your team can also set up alerts that notify IT whenever files are shared with unauthorized accounts. Those alerts can then trigger automated workflows that revoke public sharing links to enforce an ongoing data security policy.

Want to learn the ins and outs of BetterCloud? Register for our self-paced training via BetterCloud Flight School!

Next steps

Preparing for a mass offboarding due to layoffs is never a fun, or wanted task for IT. However, if your team is facing this challenge, you’ll want to make sure your data is protected, and that departing employees are treated with respect and care.

Your IT team can always take the extra step to advocate for resources to those impacted by job loss. Managers can create personalized “thank you” videos and write LinkedIn recommendations, while the company could consider offering job placement help and financial assistance where possible. Large layoffs are always a difficult, emotional time, so every little bit of support helps.

Right away, you’re unable to access your new Slack account. After IT intervenes and gets Slack going, you log in and realize they got your job title wrong. You could follow up on that, but you realize you don’t even have clearance to the Slack chats your team uses, so you’re going to have to bug IT about that first. And you almost forgot—there’s a Zoom meeting in 45 minutes and no sign of a login and password for that, either. You realize each subsequent issue means another ticket to submit to IT, with your manager cc’d for approval on every last one. So much for hitting the ground running!

If a prized new hire’s first day goes something like this, they likely won’t be spreading word of how innovative and modern your company is. 

Unfortunately, a smooth onboarding cycle is getting harder and harder for IT departments to pull off. 

Other departments like HR and payroll have paperwork and new permissions to add to the process, and with more new hires working remotely, onboarding becomes increasingly confusing. The same goes for departing employees and employees moving within the company. 

The solution is a process called automated user provisioning. In this article, we’ll show you how it can help IT avoid these pitfalls and foster a happy, innovative workforce. 

What is user provisioning? 

User provisioning is the process of granting employees certain clearance levels and access to applications and data within a company. For example, it’s deciding who has admittance to a Slack chatroom for company managers, or permission to view files containing sensitive client information. 

User provisioning can also occur during an employee’s time with a company, such as when the employee is promoted or assigned to a different team. And finally, there’s de-provisioning; when an employee leaves your company, you’ll want to make sure their access and credentials have been revoked and passed along elsewhere, if necessary. 

Why user provisioning is so time-consuming in a SaaS-filled workplace

According to BetterCloud’s 2023 State of SaaSOps report, the average organization has 130 apps in its SaaS stack. That’s a lot of accounts for IT to create and manage users within. As remote workers join on across time zones, IT tickets can feel like they’re piling up around the clock. (All this in addition to the hoops you have to jump through when a new app is added to your SaaS environment).

For a company with over 200 employees, manual onboarding takes an average of six hours per new hire, and seven for manual offboarding of a departing worker. Which brings us to the much more appealing (and efficient) alternative…

Why it’s so important to automate user provisioning

Automated user provisioning provides and manages access to data, systems, and applications within a company through automated processes. Manual user provisioning is extremely time-consuming and can lead to costly human errors from overworked IT staffers, who’d be better utilized (and happier!) tackling more strategic projects within your company’s infrastructure. 

And think of our new worker example from the introduction—no one wants their IT department to be known for how long its new hires are always waiting around for their login credentials. Instead, new hires will be impressed with a modern, mistake-free welcome. 

For example, a BetterCloud onboarding workflow enables IT to create new accounts by pulling new employees’ details directly from Google or Azure AD. No more misspelled names or misplaced job titles.

Once you automate provisioning, your company’s gains will soar beyond eliminating problems. For instance, studies show that 69% of employees are more likely to remain with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding. (Check out our deep dive on the correlation between automation and employee retention).

How to automate user provisioning in onboarding

To begin to automate provisioning for new hires, you must first select a SaaS management platform (SMP). Yes, alternatives to SMPs—such as iPaaS and IDaaS—may offer automation capabilities, but they are best suited to automating more basic tasks, like sending a Slack message when a Salesforce event occurs. SMPs, like BetterCloud, are by far the most user-friendly choice because they allow IT to automate complex workflows much more easily. Otherwise, your IT staff would need to build the workflow itself, likely wasting valuable time learning all that scripting. 

To provide the best onboarding experience, you can use your SMP to build a zero-touch workflow, which automates every manual task in the process. BetterCloud interprets metadata from the apps it’s connected to, so it can understand who manages who, or if an account for a certain user already exists inside an app. 

Implementing zero-touch onboarding with BetterCloud will lead to immediate gains in some of the most important apps in your SaaS stack. BetterCloud can automatically provision and deprovision user accounts in Slack and Zoom. Without IT having to make a move, BetterCloud can automatically provision accounts in Microsoft Forms and Zendesk.

All it takes is a manager’s approval and the automated process is set into motion! 

How to automate user provisioning for other use cases

User account provisioning is an important process your company will have to revisit well beyond the onboarding phase. For events during an employee’s tenure that necessitate new logins and clearances—such as a promotion or a transition to another team—zero-touch workflows again make the process succinct for IT. 

Same goes for mergers and acquisitions. These can be daunting (and costly) times for IT departments, when tech overlap and security gaps must be sorted out promptly and accurately. With BetterCloud, IT can quickly build automated workflows that do exactly that for M&A. 

Let’s say a larger company that uses Salesforce acquires a smaller company that uses Zendesk. Using BetterCloud, IT could quickly assemble an automated workflow that creates Salesforce accounts based off the existing Zendesk accounts, then deletes those Zendesk accounts to save costs. 

Automated provisioning processes are also invaluable when an employee leaves the company. A workflow that erases an outgoing staffer’s credentials at 5:00 pm on their last day and automatically transfers all necessary data and logins assures a smooth transition to a new employee and reduces the risk of security breaches during this transitory phase. 

Conclusion

An SMP like BetterCloud was purpose-built for automating user provisioning. With its 70+ out of the box integrations and the capability to easily create custom integrations, BetterCloud lets you provision—and deprovision—accounts quickly and easily. 

That’s not to say there’s no learning curve with BetterCloud. But with its user-friendly interface and “when-if-then” workflow logic, the learning curve is designed to be a smooth one. Unlike other platforms which require coding, BetterCloud’s no-code approach allows IT to create automated workflows within heavily used SaaS apps—Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta, Zoom, Slack, etc.—right away. To personalize those workflows, BetterCloud comes equipped with 1,000+ out of box actions. And since BetterCloud was designed to be flexible enough to extend to the thousands of SaaS apps on the market today, there’s no need for frequent, expensive updates as your SaaS stack evolves. 

BetterCloud is here to unlock the potential of your team—especially in an increasingly remote workplace. To see BetterCloud in action, schedule a demo today.

This new integration gives you access to new workflow actions related to your “Team” in Miro and all of your Miro Boards. This allows you to automate changes to teams, admin access within a team, removal of board access, board ownership, board roles, and more.

(Note: the new Miro Enterprise integration requires a company admin role in order to complete the OAuth requirements for the integration.)

This integration can help automate tedious but necessary user lifecycle management tasks with BetterCloud workflows. This means you can easily add steps to your onboarding workflow to automatically provision a new Miro license, and add users to existing boards based on their department. 

To keep proprietary data Miro safe, you can also quickly add steps to your employee offboarding workflow. In just minutes, your offboarding workflow can:

• Remove access to Miro boards
• Transfer Miro board ownership to managers for business continuity
• Delete their Miro account to reclaim the license and save cost
  

Actions in Miro can be automated for employees that have moved departments or changed roles. You can automatically remove or grant access to existing Miro boards, change their team, and more, all within the BetterCloud platform. 

BetterCloud’s standard Miro integration is available for all Miro users with Free, Starter, or Business licenses and gives you access to workflow actions related to your Miro boards. These workflow actions allow you to automate board access changes, board ownership changes, and much more.

Regardless of which Miro integration you use, integrating Miro and BetterCloud will enable IT teams to automate repetitive tasks related to changes in your Miro environment. Your team gets valuable time back to solve larger business challenges, and changes happen faster, keeping teams productive.

For information on how to update your Miro integration or to install our new Miro Enterprise integration visit this article in our Support Knowledgebase or reach out to your BetterCloud account team today.