Leverage Best Practice SaaSOps Workflows with BetterCloud Templates

IT is responsible for taking thousands of manual actions to manage and secure SaaS applications. With a SaaSOps platform, these actions can be bundled into automated workflows to save time and ensure every action is completed every time.

“The implementation of workflows has a profound effect on tasks that were once manual and time consuming.” —Eric Amlie, Director of IT, InVision

However, many IT professionals have never had to think about holistic workflows across their SaaS applications and what needs to happen as part of these routine processes. Since each application has a unique setup, the learning curve to understand the steps to perform (and where they live) in each application is steep.

We know a thing or two about automating these manual tasks. In 2020 alone, BetterCloud has run over one million automated workflows for our customers across 60+ integrations. But asking all of our customers who are setting up workflows to leverage our expert teams for best practices is time consuming.

To scale our expertise around SaaSOps workflows and use cases to all of our customers 24/7, we created BetterCloud Workflow Templates.

BetterCloud Workflow Templates

BetterCloud Templates simplify the process of creating workflows for the most common automated policies in your SaaS environment. Our templates don’t just tell you what best practice looks like—they actually walk you through the setup of pre-configured, multi-step workflows in a wizard, making it easy to get up and running.

The wizard experience presents questions to prompt you to select the right triggers for your environment.

Additionally, Workflow Templates normalize the steps across applications, so instead of searching for “Sign Out User” in Zendesk, “Block User from Organization” in GitHub, and “Delete User, Delete Bypass Codes” in Duo Security, our offboarding template has these all grouped into “Revoke Access.” This enables IT teams to quickly select the different types of actions needed for a process without getting inundated by the nuances of each application’s administrator console.

Since releasing Workflow Templates last month, we have saved customers almost 100 hours through workflows set up via templates. Here are the most popular and impactful templates available today in BetterCloud:

Offboarding

Offboarding is more than just revoking access. There are many more steps than people often realize—steps that are critical for data security, compliance efforts, and business continuity. We’ve offboarded millions of employees across 3,000+ companies, so we’ve seen all kinds of variations of offboarding workflows.

This template includes all of the steps you could need to take across all of your applications to ensure that a user no longer retains access to applications or the sensitive data within them.

We also have steps to remove their connected devices, sign out of active sessions, set up email forwarding and autoreplies, and transfer ownership of their assets to a manager or another user.

Automating this critical policy guarantees you’re taking every step to protect your organization every time a user leaves and you have a complete audit trail to prove it.

Onboarding

Onboarding users is critical to ensuring their success with your organization. Organizations with a standardized onboarding process experience 62% greater new hire productivity and 50% greater new hire retention. It’s next to impossible though to remember the nuances of each department’s processes and then how to accomplish those tasks in dozens of applications.

BetterCloud’s onboarding template walks you through the steps to ensure users across every department and team have exactly what they need to hit the ground running on day one.

Do everything you can to make them successful, including getting them access to applications, giving them permissions to the appropriate files and folders, and sending a welcome Slack message or email telling them how to reach out to IT for questions or help.

Revoke super admin privileges

Super admins are users who have full access to all system administrative controls in native SaaS admin consoles. Super admins can access and manipulate every part of your organization’s SaaS applications, so it’s important to keep the number of super admins in your environment to a minimum.

Depending on the size of your org, we generally recommend having a total of three super admins in order to mitigate risk. We’ve seen that most organizations actually have 13-19 super admins in each SaaS app. This is a massive security risk. Each additional super admin presents more entry points into your environment and more opportunities for dangerous human error.

By leveraging this template, teams are able to automatically revoke super admin access from any users who have been granted those privileges and exceed the threshold of your set number of super admins. This greatly improves the security of your organization and reduces the risk of insider threats.

Manage guest users (Microsoft 365)

Generally, IT keeps all employees under lock and key, but with the rise of SaaS collaboration apps, it has become easy for employees to add external users without anyone’s knowledge. Guest access in Microsoft 365 groups lets employees collaborate with people from outside your organization. While this might be good for a specific use case, you don’t want to grant this access indefinitely.

The Manage Guest User template waits for 30 days before asking for approval to remove guests who no longer need access. If the employee responsible for the guest user approves the request, BetterCloud will automatically offboard the guest.

Archive empty public channels (Slack)

Leaving empty public Slack channels in your environment is not a security threat. However, when employees have to search through a graveyard of defunct channels, it can be challenging to locate active channels that contain pertinent information for their role.

This template sends a message to the channel to ensure users are not using it and then waits a set duration of days before permanently deleting it. The archived contents remain searchable for channel members, so you don’t have to worry about disrupting the data that existed in those channels.

We recommend that all companies with an instance of Slack set this workflow up. It takes one minute to do, and it saves you from headaches and removes employee confusion.

To learn more about Workflow Templates, please speak with your customer success manager to schedule a demonstration, or check out this Help Center article for more details.

Not on BetterCloud yet? Request a demo today to learn more about how BetterCloud’s Workflow Templates will save you time and ensure proper security for your SaaS environment.