There has been a rapid surge in remote work, and now many companies support distributed locations with workers around the world. In addition to boosting worker morale and retention, allowing remote work provides an organization with access to a wider pool of talent by opening up hiring in more geographic locations. However, while remote and hybrid work arrangements have their benefits, they also create challenges. Remote workers are often more difficult to onboard than an organization’s on-site personnel, and can be challenging to do in locations where you don’t currently have staff or offices. 

Onboarding is Fragmented Process

Onboarding employees, contractors, and other workers can be a complex process with many moving parts. Employees need to be entered into HR systems, registered for payroll, and provided with the tools and devices that they need to do their jobs. In recent years, solutions have emerged to streamline the administrative portions of the employee onboarding process. For example, Deel and Remote are both solutions that make it easy for companies to onboard employees from an HR/payroll perspective, regardless of their physical location. 

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However, many organizations struggle with addressing the IT side of employee onboarding. Before an employee can start work, the company needs to provide them with the devices and access needed to do their jobs. This is a much more complex logistical challenge than entering an employee’s details in a corporate database or provisioning their accounts. Employees and managers are often left frustrated that a new hire can’t start work until the IT team has time to send their devices and/or go through cumbersome processes of setting up VDIs or VPNs.  

The Challenges of IT Onboarding

One of the first decisions that an organization must make when onboarding a new employee or contractor is whether to provide them with a company-owned device or allow them to work from a personal device. Both of these choices have their pros and cons.

Corporate Devices

Providing company-owned devices can simplify IT security and compliance management since they provide the company with a greater degree of control over the devices. Also a fleet of similar devices makes it easier for IT to maintain these devices and perform customer service and troubleshooting. However, with a distributed workforce, providing company-owned devices can create significant delays before an employee can begin work. Devices must be purchased, configured, and shipped to the remote worker before they can start. Any delays in this process may leave employees waiting for shipped devices unable to start work.

BYOD

The other option is to allow remote employees or contractors to work from personally-owned devices, or a device they purchase from a local store. With the devices available at their location, the risk of shipping issues and similar delays is greatly decreased. However, a BYOD policy for remote work can introduce other challenges around device configuration and security. To ensure that corporate data and applications accessed from personal or locally bought devices are properly protected, an organization may mandate that certain endpoint security solutions and configuration settings be in place for BYOD. Getting remote workers’ devices compliant and secure can be complex and time-consuming, introducing delays as well.

Expedite Onboarding and Secure BYOD with Sonet.io

BYOD is the ideal choice for supporting the remote workforce. BYOD enables companies to rapidly onboard new employees and contractors, and workers often prefer to use their chosen devices. However, companies also need to protect themselves against the potential security risks associated with remote work. Relying on endpoint security and configuration management solutions for BYOD can be complex, unscalable, and prone to security gaps.

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Sonet.io enables companies to support remote work and BYOD securely and streamlines the onboarding process. With Sonet.io, remote workers can access any corporate application or server securely from any browser, eliminating the need to secure remote users’ devices.

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Sonet.io is also designed to enable companies rapidly and securely onboard new workers into their environments. IT administrators can create user groups and define granular, zero-trust security controls for access to corporate applications and systems with a no-code policy editor. Once a user has been added to a group, these policies are in-place, and they’re ready to work.

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Remote work has become a fact of life, and, for many companies, IT and security have long been the stumbling block for onboarding new employees. With Sonet.io, organizations can onboard a new worker in moments and apply zero-trust security controls to protect the organization. To see how quickly and easily Sonet can be deployed in your organization, get started with a free trial in just 15 minutes today.