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What is employee offboarding automation for IT?

Offboarding departing employees or contractors is always urgent… or should be. As long as email accounts remain, and unattended credentials float around, so does insider risk. In fact, a 2022 Ponemon Institute study says that 56% of firms find employees as its main source. Another study, nearly half of firms say at least 5% of former users retained access to SaaS and data after leaving. The solution? It’s employee offboarding automation for IT.

Let’s dive into:

offboarding employees workflow template

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is employee offboarding automation?

As a key process within user lifecycle management, employee offboarding automation uses orchestrated workflows to revoke the SaaS apps and technology departing employees and contractors used to do their jobs.

Automation for offboarding is a primary use case for adopting a SaaS management platform.

Why IT should automate employee offboarding

Once developed, automated workflows make the user offboarding process easy, quick, and flawless. Each and every time an employee or contractor leaves.

With it, comes many benefits for both IT and the whole organization. For starters, it:

  • Saves time and money from new operational efficiencies: By automating offboarding, you can eliminate laborious, boring work associated with revoking accounts for each SaaS app in native admin consoles (each of which IT has to learn), removing departing users to all their calendars, groups, files, Slack channels, and folders. You can even automate arrangements for the computer return, including sending out a box with a return label.

    Since automation does all these tasks for you, IT saves time and since time is money, savings go directly to the bottom line.
  • Eliminates human error and improves security. Because you’ve ditched the spreadsheet, you eliminate the possibility of forgetting a step, or inconsistently performing them.

    By automating offboarding, workflows can systematically revoke users from all their SaaS apps, including cloud productivity suites, any identity management or single sign-on apps, and VPN access. Automation ensures important tasks are always done, thereby keeping security posture high.
  • Enables easy compliance to documented security policy. By automating the IT offboarding process, when completed, logs reveal that IT followed procedures. Furthermore, never-expiring audit logs are always available to show offboarding happened as intended whenever your organization should require it.

Defining requirements: Steps for automating employee offboarding

So how do you get started with employee offboarding automation? Of course, without the right IT tool, it’s harder to completely automate it so it’s zero touch.

And to choose the best user offboarding automation tool, it all starts with requirements, which is rooted in defining all steps to securely offboard departing employees and contractors from your SaaS stack.

Download the Ultimate Offboarding Checklist

Develop workflows with these actions

To get the IT portion of offboarding rolling, the process generally begins with human resources (HR). Two ways can trigger it, and which way depends on which HR tool, what it considered the single source of truth, and integrations in use.

  1. HR makes an employee or contractor inactive in a human resource system (HRIS) such as Greenhouse, BambooHR or Workday. This action automatically triggers a zero-touch workflow to complete offboarding.
  2. HR submits a help desk ticket to an ITSM, which then triggers an alert to a SaaS management platform to run the workflow.

If your company is like most, at a minimum, your IT checklist steps to offboard departing users probably includes:

  1. Remotely disable users, clear any of the user’s current sessions, and lock devices, including computers, tablets, and phones, preventing departing users from deleting files or inappropriately sharing company information.
  2. Send email to departing users with instructions on how to return work and send email to IT to retrieve them.
  3. Hide user in the directory, making this person invisible in groups, calendars, etc.
  4. Perform security-related clean-up tasks, including user access from authentication.
  5. Revoke user access from all apps, including:
    • SSO or IDaaS
    • Cloud productivity suite like Google Workspace or Microsoft O365, including email
    • Messaging tool Slack
    • Meeting or video conferencing like Zoom
    • Individual file storage like Box, Dropbox, or Drive
    • Specialized or business function SaaS apps, like Asana, Genesys, Salesforce or Adobe
  6. Remove user from all calendars, groups, and Slack channels.
  7. Remove user to shared resources like storage and folders.
  8. Transfer files to manager.
  9. Archive user’s resources for some designated duration.
  10. Order computer return instructions for retrieval.

By using a tool that can automate all these offboarding steps, you can perform all these tasks in bulk at the same time.

All in all, offboarding automation allows IT to spend less time on mundane tasks and more on the strategic IT projects that help the business grow.

And the only IT work required? Developing that automated workflow once, and with some maintenance time, it can run again and again.

Define according to your organization’s offboarding needs

When it comes to maximizing automation’s benefits in your SaaS stack, it’s important to use the tool that best supports your organization’s unique processes.

In offboarding, as shown in the section above, removing departing contractors and employees from all the necessary IT and SaaS resources is much more than simply deleting a user’s SaaS app accounts.

Rather, offboarding is a series of crucial actions that IT must perform to promptly:

  • Remove user access from all resources
  • Transfer files to retain them for compliance, knowledge retention and work continuity
  • Make SaaS licenses immediately available for redeployment

Finally, the best tool for automated offboarding should be able to efficiently create workflows to perform them all with a solid return on investment.

Define ROI with the SMP Playbook

Weighing your IT offboarding automation options

For employee and contractor onboarding, you can choose from many different types of software vendors. So many claim to automate some degree of onboarding and user lifecycle management including:

  • Integration Platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors
  • Single sign-on tools (SSO) and Identity-as-a-service providers (IDaaS)
  • Combo HR/IT/Finance tools
  • IT service management (ITSM) tools
  • SaaS management platforms (SMPs).

Like every big IT software decision your team must make, you need to dig into the details to truly understand what it can do for you.

For starters, how a tool works and how it orchestrates automated workflows is important. A tool’s user experience is crucial to evaluate and understand. Why? Because your employee offboarding tool needs to be easy to learn, as well as simple to create and manage IT automations. After all, without a great user experience, you can’t have a fast return on investment (ROI).

Next, buyers should compare tools based on the numbers of pre-built integrations, templates, and actions – and the subscription packages that are available. After all, these all impact the true costs and ROI of automation.

With that, let’s dig in and cut through the confusion around your choices for automating IT offboarding.

1. iPaaS solutions

Their primary use case is to enable applications to use data living throughout your infrastructure. This includes multiple SaaS apps, on-premises applications and databases, as well as cloud infrastructure. Residing in an enterprise’s data stack, iPaaS tools are very strong in point-to-point integrations for data sharing. They’re made of pre-built connectors, business rules, mapping, and transformations for developing and orchestrating data integration flows.

iPaaS advantages

  • Can automate basic app deprovisioning
  • Have many SaaS app integrations

iPaaS disadvantages

  • Because of how an iPaaS Ingests and analyzes app data, it needs both more automation steps and database queries to access user info
  • Each database query must be added as a workflows step when writing workflows, requiring more time to both build and manage them
  • As offboarding workflows scale to include more apps and tasks, iPaaS workflows tend to become very complicated
  • Database queries needlessly eat up bandwidth and exceed API call limits
  • No never-expiring logs for auditing activity
  • No error handling notifications, so you don’t know if a workflow executed

2. SSO/iDaaS tools

The primary use case for these solutions is identity and access management to authenticate users into multiple SaaS applications with a single set of credentials.

SSO advantages

  • Many pre-built integrations
  • Can automate basic tasks like deprovisioning for apps, email accounts, calendars, groups

SSO disadvantages

  • Not purpose-built for automating user lifecycle management
  • Need many more workflow steps to automate the same task compared to other tools, like SaaS management platforms
  • Require more programming skill to create automations as they tend to be more low-code platforms, as opposed to no-code builders that any IT member can easily use
  • License subscription tiers don’t offer unlimited numbers of workflows
  • Free or inexpensive entry tiers include a low number of workflow (e.g., like five)
  • Both parent and child workflows count in subscription limits
  • Price increases a lot as you move up from entry tiers
  • High number of workflows executions make it very expensive
  • A small IT workflow management team is best to prevent spiraling costs, so can’t build skills for the whole team

3. Combo HR/IT/Finance tools

These tools have a broad use case - as opposed to a traditional primary use case - as in a single data platform, they aspire to automate away the manual administrative work in a wide variety of organizational operations including HR, Finance, and IT apps.

Combo HR/IT/Finance tool advantages for IT

  • Revoke access using their basic, built-in MDM for endpoint management
  • Ships return box with shipping label directly to departing employees
  • Includes basic policy and compliance functionality

Combo HR/IT/Finance tool disadvantages for IT

  • Allows little customization
  • Capability-rich but doesn’t do anything very well
  • Smaller quantity of third-party integrations
  • Workflow creation is complex, even for basic tasks like app deprovisioning
  • Most useful for small organizations with no IT team, but with IT, can be limiting
  • User lifecycle management is mostly oriented around HR-related tasks like learning management and payroll, and less around IT needs
  • Only HR, and not IT, can revoke user accounts because as a payroll system, former employees need access to info like tax forms
  • IT must manually deprovision each SaaS app account

4. IT Service Management (ITSM) tools

The primary use case for ITSMs is to manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to users, from the designing, creation, delivery, and support of IT services.

Their focus in employee offboarding automation is not solely on SaaS deprovisioning, but on legacy assets, hardware, virtual machines, and cloud instances. However, there are many ITSM choices and some automate user lifecycle management, including employee offboarding in the SaaS environment, better than others.

ITSM advantages

  • Can automate routing, assignment, and approval processes to SaaS, hardware, on-prem software, and services well
  • Comprehensive audit trail

ITSM disadvantages

  • "Low code" workflow designer, instead of no-code builder, is more complicated for non-developers to automate offboarding from SaaS apps
  • Automation can require expensive consultants
  • Complex subscription packages and licensing
  • High vendor lock-in risk
  • Not focused completely on the SaaS environment

5. SaaS management platforms

The primary use case is to help IT automate manual SaaS tasks like onboarding and offboarding, optimize SaaS spend, provide file governance and security, and manage SaaS configurations. IT can choose from a wide field of SMPs in the market, but the most suitable ones for offboarding have robust, comprehensive automation capabilities.

SMP advantages

  • Purpose-built and optimized for automating SaaS apps and users
  • Detailed offboarding automation templates enable easy customization
  • Large quantity of pre-built integrations for the most commonly-used SaaS applications
  • Easy-to-use, no-code workflow builder with a great IT user experience
  • Built-in logic and operational intelligence around SaaS apps and users, translating to fewer workflow steps needed than other types of automation tools
  • Integrations for tools for IT management like ITSM, endpoint management tools, iPaaS, and SSOs for tighter operational integration
  • Custom API to meet unique SaaS app integration needs
  • Flexibility with on-demand or scheduled workflows
  • Workflow branching to run fewer, but more complex automated offboarding
  • Never-expiring audit logs show activity and workflow execution for compliance
  • No limits on workflows and integrations to enable predictable costs, rapid ROI, and true IT citizen development

SMP disadvantages

  • Many options to evaluate
  • Learning curve for automating manual employee offboarding and other repetitive SaaS management tasks your IT team does

All in all, choosing the best tool, the best SMP for your IT team, requires knowing your processes. Thus, define offboarding steps to automate, both your current and future state. Most importantly, deploy the tool that is flexible enough to meet user lifecycle management goals as they change.

Once you begin your employee offboarding automation journey, you’re certain to uncover new SaaS duties to automate. This is why the only choice is an end-to-end SaaS management platform.

Better offboarding automation with BetterCloud

BetterCloud is the world’s only end-to-end SaaS management platform. Designed to help IT teams like yours, it manages the entire SaaS lifecycle, including all users, apps, and spending, as well as automates key processes like onboarding, offboarding, and SaaS-related help desk tasks.

In addition, BetterCloud is more than a user lifecycle automation platform to ease SaaS stack management challenges. It also simplifies and enhances Google administration to eliminate the need for GAM scripting. Finally, to keep your SaaS stack operating securely and cost-effectively, BetterCloud offers IT unmatched spend optimization and file governance capabilities.

For automating employee and user offboarding, our automation capabilities feature:

  • Easy-to-use, extensive and proven automation functions, so you don’t have to compromise between flexibility and control
  • A solid IT user experience to make writing and maintain workflows easy and efficient
  • A visual, no-code Workflow Builder for easy workflow development and maintenance
  • Ability to trigger workflows on-demand and scheduled
  • A large library of 1000+ actions, triggers, and templates
  • 90+ deep integrations to common apps
  • Automatic ticketless help desk resolutions for users in Slack that never generate a ticket
  • Reliable workflow execution
  • Never-expiring activity logs for an audit trail
  • Great training, as well as customer support and customer success teams staffed with humans providing real help and problem-solving
  • Unlimited workflows and unlimited integrations

Ready to learn what BetterCloud can do for you right now?