#cybersecurity | hacker #cybersecurity | #hackerspace | Better Onboarding & Offboarding for Organizations with G Suite

By Zach DeMeyer Posted January 25, 2020

Onboarding and offboarding are critical responsibilities for both HR and IT departments. Thankfully, from an IT perspective, both processes can be fairly straightforward with the proper tools. For example, organizations with G Suite can leverage a cloud directory service to automate much of their onboarding and offboarding requirements, creating a better experience for both IT admins and end users.

Traditional G Suite Lifecycle Management

Before we talk about on- and offboarding G Suite users with a cloud directory service, let’s talk about how one manages the G Suite identity lifecycle without any additional tooling.

Onboarding

Onboarding in G Suite primarily involves providing users with a Google account for work. Doing so gives them access to the entire productivity suite, including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Calendar, etc. It’s entirely possible for an IT admin to carry out this onboarding process manually. When an organization has more than a couple of employees to onboard into G Suite, however, manual onboarding becomes a major pain.

This process is not limited solely to G Suite either. For overall onboarding, IT admins still need to account for the new user’s system and their access to networks and applications (unless those applications connect to Google via OAuth or SAML). Unfortunately, many of these fall outside the scope of an admin’s ability to onboard using only a Google identity, so IT organizations need an additional solution to do so. More on that later.

Offboarding

Removing ex-employees from G Suite is a much easier process. From the Google Admin Console, organizations can disable user email addresses, as well as set commands to forward future emails and save existing ones. They will need to download and remove the user’s Drive content. Then the account can be deleted.

Of course, this process still doesn’t account for non-Google resources. Like with onboarding, an additional solution is required to manage the offboarding of said resources.

G Suite Lifecycle Management with a Cloud Directory Service

Let’s stop and think about the concept of the Google identity. A Google identity gives an employee access to the entire (Read more…)