Scaling Secure Seasonal Workforces with Deep Freeze Cloud: Best Practices for Onboarding & Offboarding

Many businesses experience seasonal fluctuations. It’s rare for a company to have the same demand for its products or services year-round, but for some organizations, these fluctuations are so dramatic as to define their operations. A “seasonal business” could be anything from an ice cream shop by the beach to a personal tax services company with locations nationwide. In either case, these businesses probably hire seasonal staff, and this can have IT and cybersecurity ramifications.

Why Do Seasonal Staff Pose a Problem?

Seasonal employees are great and, in many cases, necessary for businesses in numerous sectors. However, hiring, training and managing a seasonal workforce presents challenges that aren’t present or as pronounced with year-round employees. 

When a business scales up its workforce, even as part of an expected annual increase, it’s often impractical to devote the same time and resources to onboarding as for permanent hires. This has IT and security implications. 

Here are five cybersecurity risks seasonal employees may exacerbate for an organization:

• Click-happiness: With less time for formal cybersecurity training, seasonal hires may be more likely to fall for phishing scams or “urgent” social engineering tactics. The lack of training, combined with often fast-paced work environments, can result in upticks in breaches of this nature. 
• Configuration drift: In the rush to meet demand, temporary users often change system settings unintentionally or unthinkingly. This could mean disabling firewalls or installing browser extensions that inadvertently open backdoors for attackers.
• Shadow IT proliferation: To do their jobs faster, seasonal staff may use unapproved personal cloud storage or messaging apps to share company data, bypassing an organization’s secure corporate stack.
• Credential fatigue: High-turnover environments often lead to “password shortcuts.” If a manager or fellow employee is tired of going through the proper channels to grant seasonal staff the right access, they may do something like write credentials on sticky notes or use weak, easily guessable passwords that outlive the employee’s contract.
• The “ghost” user: When the season ends, offboarding isn’t always a high priority. This is far from ideal, as inactive accounts belonging to former employees are prime targets for hackers looking for an unmonitored entry point into the network.

Onboarding: Establishing a Secure Baseline from Day One

Including cybersecurity and IT best practices as part of training seasonal hires can help alleviate some threats. But it’s probably impractical to devote the necessary resources and time to educate seasonal employees enough to lower the risk significantly. And this risk is especially acute in environments where temporary staff are issued their own work devices, or even if they share workstations with other employees.

This is why it’s important for IT administrators to create a “gold image” — the perfect version of a work device for a particular organization. It’s a pre-configured blueprint that allows companies to build a computer with the exact settings it needs and then capture it. This allows IT teams to copy those configurations to countless other devices in the business’s fleet, rather than manually changing the settings on every computer.

Freezing Your Gold Image

Faronics innovated Deep Freeze Cloud to offer various features. Chief among them is its Reboot-to-Restore technology. This allows IT admins to create a Frozen drive within a device — a drive where all changes are wiped away with every restart. The settings reset to the gold image standard.

With this gold image effectively locked in time, workstations become virtually indestructible. For example, if a seasonal worker makes an unauthorized change — whether it’s selecting new desktop wallpaper, saving 5GB of junk files or accidentally downloading malware — they’ve deviated from the gold image. But because Deep Freeze knows exactly what the gold version looks like, it simply discards the changes and pulls the master version back up the moment the device restarts.

Offboarding: Closing the Loop and Securing Assets

Clearly, onboarding is key. But businesses shouldn’t neglect offboarding, as it’s a great opportunity to mitigate risks. Deep Freeze Cloud makes offboarding simpler with the reassurance that a single restart permanently purges all temporary files, cached credentials and sensitive customer data. But IT teams or HR should still take the time to deactivate work accounts of departing staff.

For remote staff, the Cloud Console allows IT teams to lock or wipe orphaned devices remotely, so if seasonal staff don’t return them on time, this won’t pose a security risk. And because the gold image remains Frozen, businesses can transition hardware from a departing seasonal hire to a new one in minutes, eliminating the need to manually re-image hardware for the next cycle.

Protect Your Seasonal Business With Deep Freeze

Cyberthreats aren’t seasonal; they’re an ever-present danger. Reach out to the Faronics team to learn how Deep Freeze Cloud can protect your workstations.