For both security and availability, Wave uses SaaS applications for all its internal operations—and app integration delivered by BetterCloud improves efficiency across the entire organization.

Challenge:

The top priority for the IT team at Wave is ensuring each employee has the tools they need to succeed. They handle a variety of tasks, including onboarding new employees, offboarding employees as they leave, and transfers within Wave when users are either promoted or change teams. At each step, Wave’s IT function provides software, hardware, and support for all tools and utilities. 

Wave’s senior IT manager says that the IT team is unusual. “Our IT philosophy is driven by the employee experience. Rather than reporting into our CTO, we answer to our Chief People Officer. We’re driven by our mission to make every employee more efficient through technology.”

The senior IT manager says that the company’s goal to make everyone more efficient was difficult to achieve because each new onboarding was treated like a bespoke event. “If a new engineer joined, we received a separate ticket to provision for Datadog, GitHub, and AWS, just to name a few. The same was true whenever someone left the company. Now that we have BetterCloud, we don’t have to manage so many tickets from so many different people—and we avoid doing the same tasks multiple times.” 

Solution:

Wave leverages BetterCloud to discover and manage SaaS apps, for user lifecycle management (onboarding and offboarding), least privilege access (based on user level), and auditing. After quickly becoming indispensable to the team, Wave’s entire IT team completed BetterCloud’s certification program — an investment in time that has been repaid several times over.

The senior IT manager says that while Wave uses multiple tools to manage its SaaS environment, BetterCloud offers the richest experience. “It’s an essential piece of our strategy because we can easily manage by specific roles and user groups. We’re going to really rely on BetterCloud for a long time.”

A faster onboarding and offboarding experience

Before Wave introduced BetterCloud workflows, onboarding and offboarding was a gigantic chore for Wave’s IT team. Not only did it take an incredible amount of time to respond to so many tickets, but the majority of onboarding and offboarding tasks needed to be completed manually. 

Today, Wave uses BetterCloud to automate its best-in-class onboarding and offboarding processes. The senior IT manager says that the team can grant access to the appropriate resources by placing each person into appropriate groups. He also says that BetterCloud has eliminated many of the blockers that made it difficult for new hires to get up to speed. 

“When I joined the team at Wave, we’d grant appropriate access to each employee by the end of the first week, or occasionally by the beginning of that person’s second week. Now, we can get all of that work done by the end of their first day.”

Wave has seen a similar impact on its ability to handle internal transfers or job promotions. According to the IT manager at Wave, the team can handle multiple changes across multiple employees in just minutes thanks to BetterCloud. 

“BetterCloud can grant users access to the service, grant them permission — depending on the service they need — and there are no mistakes.”

Senior IT Manager, Wave

More efficiency enables more strategic thinking

Now that Wave’s IT team has automated so much of its employee experience, the senior IT manager says that everyone can think more strategically about how to positively impact the business. 

“BetterCloud has given us so much time back and eliminated so much manual work,” he adds. “It has allowed us to put our sights on bigger thoughts and bigger issues.” And the IT manager agrees: “It is so much easier to on and offboard now, so we can focus on other bigger projects. It’s really awesome.”

Automation adds reliability and consistency during office disruption

The sudden shift to home offices during the pandemic was a challenge for everyone. According to the senior IT manager, “BetterCloud was the reason we had a pretty seamless transition to remote work. Wave was already very SaaS-forward. We have nothing local other than our Wi-Fi in the office, so BetterCloud enabled us to take control and better manage all that SaaS.”

BetterCloud also enabled clearer and more consistent communications across the entire organization. “Because we were able to send email notifications to new employees and their managers via BetterCloud, our communication is consistent every single time,” the IT manager says. “Whether it’s a conversation with HR about a new hire or with a manager about an employee’s maternity leave, we can create tickets based off of specific events and take action quickly.”

“There’s a lot of different situations we’ve encountered where BetterCloud saved us a ton of time.”

IT Manager, Wave

Speeding compliance reporting

Because it handles so much financial data on behalf of its customers, Wave is required to be Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified and create a Service Organization Control (SOC) report. This required a lot of tedious and labor-intensive work. Whenever an employee left, one of the most critical pieces of the process required Wave to prove that each employee who left the company no longer had access to sensitive information.

“In the past, we’d take screenshots of each person’s profile in AWS or GitHub,” the senior IT manager says. “In BetterCloud, we’ve set up two collaborative inboxes for successful or failed email notifications. Now when an auditor asks for proof that someone has been removed from our organization, we can just go to that inbox and grab a report.”

Not only has this enabled Wave to stay compliant, but it has dramatically reduced the amount of time required to complete this report. “The PCI reassessment used to take hours,” the senior IT manager says. “This year it was 10 minutes.”

Certification builds team expertise and confidence

BetterCloud recently launched a BetterCloud Administrator Certification so platform experts can showcase their expertise. There have been quite a few individuals who completed the course—but Wave is the first company whose entire IT team is BetterCloud certified. 

According to the IT manager, this has given each person the confidence to understand and execute their IT strategy in BetterCloud. “This is really empowering for everyone and enables us to distribute the workload evenly throughout the entire team,” he adds.

The senior IT manager comments on the process: “It was a great experience going into the certification. I’ve gone into certifications for different vendors, and this is probably the best experience I’ve had.” 

“The PCI reassessment used to take hours. This year it was 10 minutes. It was just, ‘Yep, here’s the PDF.’ Done.”

Senior IT Manager, Wave

Results

Challenge:

With an ambitious strategy to expand internationally and become the leading financial app, Curve is quickly bringing on new employees. In fact, the company more than doubled in the past year and is expecting to again double its employee base in the coming year. “It’s not uncommon for us to onboard 5 to 10 starters in a given week,” explains the Workplace Tech Lead Engineer for Curve.

Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer and his colleague, Hazlitt van Goethem, Junior SRE for Curve, support all of the company’s IT needs. The onboarding and offboarding process ate up a big chunk of their time because user access permissions, roles, and in-app configuration had to be manually provisioned, often with employees themselves as part of the new hire process. Pre-Covid, the IT team facilitated an in-person session for new employees to help them set up all of their accounts and laptops. In the shift to remote working, Curve’s IT team had to do a lot of extra hand-holding over video calls, as well as communicate continuously between starters and their managers to confirm information related to roles and access privileges. “It was frustrating and a waste of time whenever we had to go back and fix mistakes,” explains van Goethem.

“Offboarding was especially laborious and stressful because of the steps involved and the fact that we often found out at the last minute that we needed to deprovision users. Going remote amplified these current pain points by 10X,” continues Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

Like many lean IT departments, Curve IT team found themselves with a backlog of strategic projects as they dealt with routine – yet time-consuming – provisioning and deprovisioning-related tasks.

“Our #1 support ticket was for help accessing systems and applications. That’s simply not sustainable as we keep growing. We need to enable employees to hit the ground running as quickly as possible,” says Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

Solution:

With a belief in automating every manual task possible, Curve’s IT team began exploring identity and access management solutions, starting with Okta. Then they crossed paths with David Remington, CEO of Remitech. After understanding their needs, Remington urged them to watch a OneLogin demo.

“David only recommends what makes sense for our business, so we followed his advice. It was one of the best vendor demos I’ve ever seen,” recalls Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

OneLogin’s features included ease of use, out-of-the-box integrations with Curve’s existing systems, including numerous cloud apps for single-sign-on and role-based access control, HR-Driven integration with Hibob, and extensibility, such as an API for other teams to build custom connectors and integrate access management with their own tools as needed.

At the same time, BetterCloud’s features included management of SaaS applications, in-app workflows, and granular visibility into user behavior, such as file-sharing. According to van Goethem, “BetterCloud’s UI and workflows are well organized. The structure makes it quick and easy to plan and build effective workflows, supported by useful visuals. BetterCloud also offers more granular alerting than what is offered through specific apps, such as being able to audit file security.”

Once the team learned of the integration between OneLogin and BetterCloud, Curve’s IT team were sold. “We loved the workflow and security enabled by BetterCloud, and we were impressed with the granular provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities offered by integrating the two platforms together. The platforms complement each other, so we know one or the other can make something happen, and together we’re getting more overall automation, flexibility, and options for how we want to set up workflows to fit our organization’s needs,” says van Goethem.

Curve also appreciated OneLogin and BetterCloud’s partnership when addressing price sensitivity, especially with the uncertainty introduced by the recent pandemic outbreak. “David helped us negotiate terms that worked for us, and work seamlessly with both OneLogin and BetterCloud,” explains Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

Curve’s IT team first implemented BetterCloud to immediately improve the onboarding experience for starters by ensuring they were part of the workflow. Though they did not use it with the initial implementation, the IT team loved the BetterCloud Discover module that helps them see what apps users are using. “It gives us visibility into which apps people are truly using, so we can prioritize instead of guess,” explains van Goethem.

“The BetterCloud implementation was amazing…the best implementation of my entire career. Devin Domingo was great to work with, and I even earned my BetterCloud administration certification by going through the implementation,” explains Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer. “Before the implementation, Devin delivered a workbook and laid out the structure, flow, and timeline. This guided us to solicit input from our colleagues before the actual implementation, making for a smooth process.”

Curve then implemented OneLogin integrations and various internal and external cloud-based apps, such as SAML SSO or forms-based authentication. Explains van Goethem, “Every login goes through OneLogin and it integrates seamlessly with the majority of our applications, as well as with Hibob for HR-Driven identity provisioning.”

Results:

With OneLogin in place, users are automatically provisioned and given access to relevant apps, once Curve’s HR department creates new user accounts in Hibob, which kicks off the role-based access workflow. BetterCloud leverages OneLogin to kickoff enhanced, in-app workflows, such as provisioning users into specific Slack groups/channels and notifying IT when someone joins or leaves the company.

“Onboarding used to take 15 minutes per person. Now it happens in one or two minutes automatically. Now that 99% of onboarding or offboarding is done through OneLogin and BetterCloud, all we have to do is a quick sanity check for any alerts during the process,” says Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

Automated provisioning also means users can get up and running without IT’s assistance. “We’re a team in London, so automated onboarding means no more crazy hours helping starters in other time zones and a better employee experience,” adds van Goethem.

With Hibob as the company’s single source of truth about employees, IT isn’t a blocker. “HR knows when someone’s status is changing and will update Hibob with that information, like a role change or new title. Now, we get notified and just need to quickly check that all the corresponding system changes have happened automatically,” Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer explains. “Now when I wake up, I know that 99% of [onboading or offboarding] is done. All we have to do is a quick sanity check.”

Curve has connected the majority of their applications with OneLogin and BetterCloud. Curve manages and secures several apps, such as G-Suite, Slack, and Spoke, via BetterCloud’s modules, including Google Workspace. OneLogin provides authentication for the majority of Curve’s apps – both form-based and SAML configurations, and the integration between BetterCloud and OneLogin provides a better overall view of the company’s app landscape. “Seeing the same information appear in both tools is a confidence booster. We also gain visibility and control over our apps and users from multiple angles,” says van Goethem.

“Plus, the alerting is more granular and effective, enabling a holistic approach that gives a view into multiple factors. And it’s not coming via email where we can miss things. Now we can react quickly,” says Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

Moreover, the IT team is now confident that employees are offboarded on their final day with the company. “We don’t have to scramble to deprovision anyone with last-minute notice. It all happens automatically as soon as HR indicates they are no longer an employee. In fact, offboarding happens about ten times faster than in the past with OneLogin and BetterCloud,” says Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer.

With the BetterCloud Discover module, Curve has also saved time auditing its applications and employee access. “What took me a full day now happens automatically, so I just see the results,” says van Goethem.

According to Curve’s Workplace Tech Lead Engineer, the BetterCloud audit makes him feel more confident in the company’s security. “It’s easy to think you’re secure with your file security so it’s useful to see how files and links are being shared. Plus, all the automation enabled by OneLogin and BetterCloud has freed us to focus on strategic projects that help improve the everyday employee experience.”

Solution:

• Replaced manual onboarding and offboarding processes with BetterCloud’s automated workflows
• Leveraged BetterCloud to gain insight into which files were being shared externally
• Set up an alert that removes access to files that are shared externally after a specific number of days
• Reduced the back and forth that was previously required to communicate about these files, which can number in the hundreds or thousands, with out-of-the-box templates

Results:

• Decreased onboarding time for a group of new hires from up to two days to half an hour at most
• Minimized risks associated with offboarding
• Strengthened security posture—BetterCloud picks up where other security tools leave off
• Increased IT’s effectiveness and ability to focus on more strategic tasks

Challenge:

Employees handle sensitive and proprietary information daily, and inadvertent data exposure can trigger compliance issues and a loss of trust. Offboarding, in particular, must be carefully handled.

Solution:

• Implemented BetterCloud’s offboarding policies to offboard users across multiple applications, including Okta, Salesforce, Slack, and G Suite
• Automated a checklist of around three dozen items
• Protected PII and other confidential information from exposure due to common misconfigurations

Results:

• Enforced file security through BetterCloud’s policies
• Avoided insider threats by relying on BetterCloud’s automation
• Reduced offboarding time from one to two hours to “a couple of clicks”