The integration of new hires into the corporate ecosystem represents a high-risk period of transition. Traditional workforce onboarding often prioritizes operational speed over robust identity security, inadvertently creating a critical vulnerability window that threat actors can exploit.
This vulnerability window starts as soon as the recruitment process, as recent new headlines have shown, with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) IT worker scheme threatening nearly every industry that hires remote talent. Even after onboarding, the first several months of employment are characterized by a disproportionate exposure to cyber risk, with new hires being 44% more likely to fall for phishing attacks than their experienced colleagues who have been with the company for more than 90 days.
This acute danger zone reveals that an organization’s approach to workforce onboarding is more than just an administrative process; it is, in fact, essential to enterprise security. It takes only one compromised hire — particularly in a remote, privileged, or high-access role — to allow adversaries to steal data, disrupt systems, or damage a company's reputation and trust with customers.
An identity security fabric is critical for securing workforce onboarding
An identity security fabric is Okta's perspective on a modern approach to identity architecture. It’s not a single product you can buy, but rather a blueprint for building a resilient and unified security posture. It weaves together all of your identity tools and systems into a single, cohesive layer of security.
An identity security fabric is critical to closing identity security gaps during onboarding, as even minor issues can quickly escalate into breaches and operational risk, turning onboarding into a threat vector instead of a launchpad. Traditional onboarding often leans on manual processes, passwords, and disconnected tools, which strain IT teams, create friction for the workforce, and leave open doors for attackers. Fragmented technology means that identities, ranging from employees to devices, are managed separately, creating blind spots and inconsistent policies. Manual processes force IT teams to spend hours provisioning access, configuring devices, and resolving helpdesk tickets. And when organizations attempt to manage onboarding at a larger scale, a legacy approach to identity makes it more challenging to ensure security and compliance without compromising productivity.
What does the identity security fabric look like in action for onboarding?
With Okta, onboarding isn’t just a step in the employee lifecycle—it’s a strategic advantage. We unify identity proofing, device access, passwordless authentication, and governance into one cohesive fabric. Security is built into every moment of the experience, empowering IT and security teams to protect identities and get them to work safer and faster.
Okta transforms onboarding into a secure, seamless, and scalable experience for both admins and end users.
- Establish trust from the first interaction: Verify and confirm identities with an integrated process to validate government-issued IDs and perform liveness checks from any location
- Provision a device securely: Integrate identity security into device setup and MDM enrollment, establishing MFA from the very first laptop login
- Eliminate passwords from day one: Enroll employees in passwordless, phishing-resistant authenticators like Okta FastPass and YubiKeys to help ensure secure access
- Govern the provisioning of birthright apps: Grant role-based, just-in-time, and policy-driven access to essential resources and enable self-service access requests for additional tools, reducing errors and IT overhead
- Unify visibility and control: Manage the entire onboarding journey from a centralized dashboard, monitoring and adjusting access as needed
- Scale without compromise: Deliver a consistent experience that simplifies operations, reduces risk, and ensures compliance, without stitching together fragmented tools
Take a look at what a secure workforce onboarding experience with Okta can look like:
Secure how you onboard new hires with Okta
With Okta, you can transform onboarding from a patchwork of manual steps into a seamless, secure experience. Okta delivers a flexible identity security solution that’s open by design, integrating seamlessly with your existing ecosystem and enabling you to craft a specific user experience while keeping security front and center.
To learn more about how organizations have leveraged Okta to secure their workforce onboarding processes, explore our customer stories to understand how businesses such as ProAssurance and Booking.com have implemented an identity security fabric using the Okta Platform.
Read more about the Okta products and features that can help you support a secure and seamless start for every new worker by checking out the Secure Workforce Onboarding Guide in the Okta Support Center.
These materials are intended for general informational purposes only. You are responsible for obtaining security, privacy, compliance, or business advice from your own professional advisors and should not rely solely on the information provided herein.
