A Cloud Access Runbook for a DevOps Consultancy's PEO Pick

Draft the specific cloud access request before the person starts, not after: which client accounts, which IAM roles, and whether access is standing or requested per session. If the client requires a background check before granting console access, that check needs to clear before day one, not during their first week on the account. Rippling can start a background check from within its hiring workflow, while Justworks connects to third-party screening vendors, so confirm in a demo how much of the tracking each platform automates and who on your team still owns confirming a clear result before requesting the client-side access.

Whatever the new hire needs inside your own company, laptop, internal Slack, your ticketing system, gets set up here. Rippling ties this to the same hire record that triggered the background check, so a laptop with disk encryption and your standard tooling can be configured and shipped automatically. Justworks handles payroll and benefits enrollment cleanly at this step but leaves device configuration to whatever separate process or MDM tool your consultancy already runs; for a two-person ops team, that's one more manual step to remember on a day already full of them.

This step happens outside either platform entirely. Someone submits the IAM role request through the client's own access process, whether that's a ticket to their platform team or a self-service request in their identity provider. The only thing your HR platform contributes here is a clean, current record of who's actively engaged with which client, so whoever's granting access on the client side isn't relying on a group chat message from three weeks ago to confirm someone's still on the account. Rippling's project or department fields can hold this if your team actually keeps them updated; Justworks has no equivalent, so this record lives in whatever separate system you use for client engagement tracking.

DevOps consultants often carry active access to two or three client environments at once, and access should shrink, not just grow, as engagements wind down. Build a recurring review, monthly at minimum, that cross-checks who still has cloud access against who's still actively billing that client. Neither platform automates the client-side removal, but Rippling's more granular identity records make it easier to see, at a glance, which internal project assignments changed since the last review, which is the trigger that should prompt someone to go remove the matching cloud access. A consultancy running this review by memory instead of by a fixed date on the calendar tends to find it slips during exactly the busy weeks when staffing is changing the most, which is also when the risk of stale access is highest.

The day someone leaves, your own systems should lock down immediately, and every client whose cloud environment they touched should get a same-day heads-up to revoke access on their end. A delayed offboarding is a bigger liability here than in most consulting categories, because the access in question can modify live infrastructure. Replacing a departing engineer isn't cheap either: the median cost per hire for a nonexecutive technical role runs close to $1,200 nationally by one estimate¹, before counting the ramp time for a new hire to get comfortable inside a client's specific cloud setup.

If your consultancy is small enough that one person tracks all of this by memory and a shared doc, Justworks' simpler model and lower administrative overhead may be enough, as long as that person is disciplined about the manual steps above. Once you're running this runbook across a growing roster with engineers touching several client environments at a time, Rippling's tighter integration between hiring events and your own internal access reduces the number of manual handoffs, even though the client-side cloud work stays manual either way. Payroll and platform costs together still typically land above a third of revenue for technical services firms this size², so whichever platform you pick, the runbook discipline matters more to your risk than the fee difference between them.

Run this sequence for every engineer:

1. Draft the specific cloud access request and clear any required background check before the engineer's first day.
2. Provision your own tools on day one, including the laptop, internal Slack, and your ticketing system.
3. Submit the IAM role request through the client's own access process, since it happens outside either platform.
4. Review who still has cloud access against who is still actively billing each client, at least monthly.
5. When someone leaves, lock down your own systems immediately and give every affected client a same-day heads-up to revoke access.