Hardware procurement, device configuration, access management, and security for people who do not share an office. We ship a configured laptop before the start date, grant exactly the access the role needs, and revoke it the day someone leaves.
IT management for a distributed team is the operation that equips, secures, and offboards people who never share an office. It covers specifying and shipping configured hardware to wherever someone lives, provisioning accounts and permissions to their role, enforcing an endpoint security baseline, and revoking access and recovering the device when the engagement ends.
The structural difference from office IT is that there is no perimeter and nobody can walk to a desk. The controls that still work attach to the identity and the endpoint: who the person is, what they are allowed to reach, and whether the machine they are reaching it from is in a known state. Everything else is a policy document nobody can enforce.
The second difference is that every action crosses a border. Procurement happens in the employee's market so the keyboard layout, the power adapter, and the warranty are right. Delivery involves duties, import rules, and a customs process that does not care about a start date. Recovery at the end means collecting a laptop from a home in a country where you have no presence, which is the stage most companies never solve.
The design principle that makes this reliable is that IT actions should follow employment events rather than tickets. A start date ships a device and creates accounts, a role change revises the permission set, and a leaving date revokes access and starts recovery. Access granted because someone raised a ticket is removed only when someone raises another ticket, and nobody ever does.
Servers lived on-premise, employees worked in one location, and device management rarely crossed borders. An IT team could walk a laptop to a desk and hand over a password. That model no longer works, and most of the tooling built around it assumes a physical perimeter that distributed companies simply do not have.
Today's companies hire globally from day one. Teams span time zones, countries, and employment models, from full-time employees to contractors and EOR hires. Yet most organizations still rely on a patchwork of vendors, spreadsheets, and manual processes to manage IT, which works until the first laptop is stuck in customs or a leaver still has access to the code repository three weeks after their last day.
HireCade IT was built to solve this problem. We provide a unified IT operation that supports global teams by design, making it possible to equip, secure, and support employees wherever they work, without appointing a regional vendor in every market you hire into.
Buy or lease laptops and equipment through one operation, specified to the role and configured centrally with the applications and security policies your stack requires.
Devices delivered to employees in over 130 countries, with regional restrictions, import duties, and customs paperwork handled so the machine arrives before the start date rather than after it.
Accounts, groups, and application permissions provisioned to the role, so a new hire has what they need on day one and nothing they were never meant to have.
Disk encryption, screen lock policy, patching, and remote lock or wipe enforced on every managed device, including enrolment into Apple Business Manager or Microsoft Autopilot where supported.
When HR updates employee data, the matching IT actions follow automatically, without tickets, emails, or a spreadsheet that somebody has to remember to open.
Offboarding triggers secure device retrieval or certified disposal, so hardware and the data on it are accounted for without manual coordination across borders.
Manual IT processes do not scale. Every new hire requires device ordering, account setup, access approvals, and documentation. Every role change introduces risk, because permissions are added and almost never removed. Every offboarding becomes a race against time, and in a distributed team the person with the access is in a different time zone from the person who needs to revoke it.
We connect HR and IT so changes flow from one to the other. A start date creates the accounts and ships the device. A role change updates the permission set and the applicable security policy. A termination date revokes access and starts device recovery. The employee ends up with the access their role requires and nothing beyond it, which is a much narrower set than most companies realise they have granted.
The result is enterprise-grade security without enterprise overhead, and the underlying reason it works is that nothing depends on someone remembering. Every action leaves an audit trail, which matters when a customer security questionnaire, an insurer, or an auditor asks you to demonstrate that access was removed on the day it should have been.
What runs automatically
Nobody local to receive the device, no vendor account, and customs rules you have never dealt with.
The point at which an office-shaped IT process quietly stops working and nobody has replaced it yet.
Different employment models, different offboarding triggers, but the same access risk if it is not tracked.
Access has to end on the last day, and the hardware has to come back or be disposed of properly.
Years of role changes have left people with access nobody would grant them from scratch today.
A customer or auditor wants evidence of device encryption, endpoint visibility, and timely revocation.
A new function or acquired group that needs devices, accounts, and policy applied on the same date.
An unknown number of company laptops in former employees' homes, and no record of which or where.
One supplier relationship per country, each with its own terms, lead times, and invoice.
The three models fail in different places. Choosing badly usually shows up as either a large monthly bill for capacity you do not use, or a laptop that arrives two weeks late.
| Consideration | HireCade IT | Traditional MSP | Handle it in-house |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Distributed teams hiring across countries and employment models | Companies with offices, on-site infrastructure, or a help desk need | Teams concentrated in one location with a stable stack |
| Cost shape | Quoted per device and per managed seat, plus hardware at cost | Monthly retainer, usually per seat, with project work billed separately | IT salaries plus per-market vendor and shipping costs |
| Time to equip a new hire | Configured device shipped ahead of the start date | Depends on their supplier relationships in that country | Fast where you have a vendor, slow in every new market |
| Geographic coverage | Delivery to employees in over 130 countries | Typically strong in their home region, subcontracted beyond it | Limited to countries where you have already found a supplier |
| Access and identity | Provisioned and revoked from HR events, with audit trails | Often ticket-driven, so speed depends on their response times | Manual, and the first thing to slip when the team is busy |
| On-site support | Not offered; support is remote through managed endpoints | Usually available in their coverage area, which is the main reason to choose one | Available wherever your own people are, and nowhere else |
| Offboarding hardware | Retrieval or certified disposal handled as part of the exit | Available, though international recovery is often out of scope | Your problem, and frequently never completed |
| Who carries the admin burden | Us, including procurement, customs, and inventory records | Shared; they execute, you coordinate and chase | Entirely yours, spread across IT, HR, and finance |
| When it stops making sense | When you need on-site support or specialist infrastructure work | When most of your team is outside their coverage area | When headcount or country count grows faster than your IT team |
These are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of companies keep an internal IT lead for strategy and internal tooling, and use us for the parts that require presence in countries they do not operate in.
Hardware cost varies by specification and destination, and management cost varies by how much of the stack we run, so we quote rather than publish a single rate.
Device lifecycle
Procurement, configuration, shipping, and eventual retrieval or disposal for each machine.
Access and endpoint management
Ongoing identity, permission, and endpoint policy management for your team, driven by HR events.
Add Employer of Record
Where the person is not yet employed anywhere you have an entity, we can be the legal employer as well.
Hardware is passed through at cost, including duties and shipping. Management pricing depends on the number of seats, the applications in scope, and whether you already run an identity provider we can integrate with.
Who needs equipping, where they are, and which applications and policies apply to each role.
Hardware specified to the role, configured centrally with your applications and security baseline.
Device delivered before day one, with the accounts and permissions their role requires already active.
Role changes update access; offboarding revokes it and recovers or disposes of the device.
Device lifecycle management is the practice of treating a laptop as something with a beginning, a middle, and an end rather than a one-off purchase. The beginning is specification and procurement in the right market. The middle is configuration, enrolment into management, patching, policy enforcement, repair, and reassignment when someone changes role. The end is recovery from wherever the person lives, wiping the data, and either redeploying the machine or disposing of it with a certificate that proves the data is gone.
For a distributed team, each of those stages crosses a border. Procuring in the employee's country avoids the wrong keyboard layout, the wrong power adapter, and a warranty that cannot be claimed locally. Shipping across a border means duties, import restrictions on encrypted devices in some jurisdictions, and a customs process that does not care about your start date. Recovery at the end is the stage most companies never solve, which is why so many have an unknown number of company laptops sitting in former employees' homes.
Access control is the harder problem, and it is the one that carries the real risk. A missing laptop is a capital loss and a data exposure that encryption largely contains. An active account belonging to someone who left, or a permission granted for a project that ended two years ago, is an open door into live systems. Device count grows linearly with headcount, but access grows with every hire, every role change, every new tool the team adopts, and every temporary permission that was never withdrawn.
That is why we tie provisioning and revocation to employment events rather than to requests. If access is granted because a ticket was raised, it is removed only when someone raises another ticket, and nobody ever does. If it is granted by a role and a start date, it can be withdrawn by a leaving date automatically, and the audit trail shows exactly when. The practical test for any distributed team is simple: pick someone who left three months ago and see how long it takes to prove every one of their accounts is closed.
HireCade IT is an operational function rather than a piece of software. It covers the hardware a person needs, the accounts and permissions that let them do their job, the security policy enforced on the machine they use, and the actions that have to happen when any of that changes. The organising idea is that these are all consequences of employment events rather than independent requests, so they should follow automatically from a start date, a role change, or a leaving date.
On the hardware side that means specifying a machine to the role, buying or leasing it through one operation, configuring it centrally with your applications and security baseline, delivering it to the employee wherever they are, supporting it while it is in use, and recovering or disposing of it at the end. On the access side it means provisioning accounts, groups, and application permissions to the role, enforcing the device policy, keeping an inventory of who has what, and revoking everything when the engagement ends.
It is deliberately not everything an IT department does. We are not an on-site help desk, we do not run your product infrastructure, and we are not going to design your internal tooling. Companies with those needs usually keep an internal IT lead and use us for the parts that require presence in countries where they have none.
The other deliberate design choice is that we integrate rather than replace. Most companies already run an identity provider and an application suite that work. Ripping out a functioning identity layer introduces more risk than it removes, so we work with what you have and manage explicitly, as part of the joiner, mover, and leaver process, the systems that cannot be integrated. Knowing which systems are manual is what stops them from being forgotten.
A new hire's first day is a deadline that cannot move, and it is the one deadline distributed IT most often misses. The device has to be specified, bought in the right market, configured, shipped across a border, cleared through customs, and delivered, while the accounts have to exist, carry the right permissions, and be waiting when the person logs in. None of those steps is difficult. Doing all of them reliably, in a country where you have no presence, is the hard part.
We start from the role rather than the person. A role implies a machine specification, an application set, a permission profile, and a security policy, which means provisioning can begin as soon as an offer is accepted rather than waiting for someone to write a ticket describing what a designer needs. Buying in the employee's own market matters more than it sounds: it avoids the wrong keyboard layout, the wrong power adapter, and a warranty that cannot be claimed where the person actually lives.
Configuration happens centrally before the machine ships. Devices are enrolled into management, in Apple Business Manager or Microsoft Autopilot where those are supported, with disk encryption, screen lock policy, and patching applied from the start. The employee unboxes a machine that is already compliant instead of following a setup guide and hoping they did it correctly.
Identity is provisioned in parallel rather than afterwards. Accounts, groups, and application permissions are created to match the role, so the person has what they need on day one and nothing they were never meant to have. That second half is the part that quietly matters, because an over-provisioned new starter is the beginning of permission drift rather than an act of generosity.
In well-supplied markets a configured device can be with the employee within about a week of the specification being agreed, which is why we would rather hear about a hire at offer stage than at start date. Some destinations take materially longer because of stock availability, import restrictions, or customs processing, and we will tell you the realistic window per country rather than letting a start date slip quietly.
Joiners, movers, and leavers are usually treated as three unrelated workflows, which is why the first is rushed, the second is skipped, and the third is late. They are better understood as one process with three triggers, because they all ask the same question: given what this person's role is today, what should they have access to, and what should they not.
Onboarding is the easy trigger, because someone is waiting and will complain if it goes wrong. Role changes are the dangerous one. When a person moves teams, permissions are added for the new role and almost never removed for the old one, so entitlements accumulate quietly with every internal move. After a few years, a long-tenured employee often holds access nobody would grant them from scratch, and no single decision created that situation.
Offboarding is where the distributed part bites hardest. Access has to end on the last day, but the person with the access is frequently in a different time zone from the person who needs to revoke it, and the hardware is in a home rather than an office. When offboarding runs on tickets, revocation happens when someone gets to the queue. When it runs on a leaving date recorded in HR, it happens on the day, and the audit trail records what was removed and when.
Hardware recovery is the stage most companies never solve, which is why so many have an unknown number of company laptops in former employees' homes. We arrange collection from the employee's location and then either wipe and redeploy the machine or dispose of it with a data destruction certificate. If a device is not returned, you get a clear record of what is outstanding rather than an unpleasant discovery at the next audit.
Mixed workforces make this more important, not less. Contractors, Employer of Record hires, and direct employees often need the same systems but have different contract lengths, different offboarding triggers, and, in the case of contractors, sometimes their own hardware. We treat access management as the constant and hardware provision as the variable. A contractor using their own laptop still needs role-scoped access that ends when the engagement does.
Device count grows linearly with headcount. Access does not. It grows with every hire, every role change, every new tool the team adopts, and every temporary permission granted for a project that ended two years ago. That is why a company can have a perfectly accurate laptop inventory and still have no idea who can reach production, the billing system, or the customer database.
Least privilege is the principle that a person should hold the access their role requires and nothing beyond it. It is easy to agree with and hard to maintain, because every individual grant is reasonable at the moment it is made and nobody is responsible for the accumulation. Making the role rather than the request the unit of access is what turns the principle into something that holds, because a role can be revised and reapplied while a pile of individual grants cannot.
Periodic access reviews are the backstop. A review asks, for each system, who currently has access and whether their present role still justifies it, and it is only useful if the inventory it runs against is complete. This is where systems that were never integrated cause damage: a tool nobody listed is a tool nobody reviews, which is why we track manual systems explicitly rather than treating an incomplete automation as full coverage.
The audit trail is what turns all of this from an assertion into evidence. When a customer security questionnaire, an insurer, or an auditor asks you to demonstrate that access was removed on the day it should have been, the answer has to be a record rather than a recollection. Every provisioning and revocation action is logged against the employment event that caused it.
There is a simple test any distributed team can run this week. Pick someone who left three months ago and see how long it takes to prove that every one of their accounts is closed. The time it takes, and whether the answer is a report or a series of conversations, tells you most of what you need to know about your current process.
Support for a distributed team is a different problem from support for an office. Nobody can walk to a desk, the working day spans time zones, and the person with a broken laptop may be the only member of the company in their country. The failure modes that matter are therefore not the exotic ones but the ordinary ones: a device that will not boot the morning of a customer demo, a locked account on a Friday evening, a machine stuck in customs three days before a start date.
Because we manage the device and the identity together, most requests can be resolved without a physical visit. Managed endpoints can be reached remotely, policies can be reapplied, and access can be corrected at the identity layer rather than on the machine. When hardware genuinely fails, the answer is replacement procurement and reconfiguration in the employee's market, which is the same pipeline used to equip them in the first place.
Lost and stolen devices are worth calling out separately, because they feel like a security disaster and usually are not. Managed devices are encrypted and can be remotely locked or wiped, which means the immediate exposure is normally the hardware rather than the data. The important part is speed and sequence: tell us as soon as you know, and we act on the device and the associated accounts together rather than one at a time. The incident then stays in the device record for whatever reporting your insurer or customers require.
What we do not offer is an on-site help desk or hands-on support at a location, and we would rather say so than imply a presence we do not have. If your company has offices, on-site infrastructure, or a walk-up support expectation, an internal team or a traditional managed service provider covers that better, and plenty of companies use us alongside one of them for the countries they do not operate in.
Security for a company without an office cannot depend on a perimeter, because there is not one. The controls that still work are the ones attached to the identity and the endpoint: who the person is, what they are allowed to reach, and whether the machine they are reaching it from is in a known state. Everything else is commentary.
The endpoint baseline is unglamorous and effective. Full disk encryption means a lost laptop is a hardware loss rather than a data breach. A screen lock policy handles the coffee shop and the shared flat. Patching closes the vulnerabilities that are actually exploited, which are overwhelmingly the known ones. Remote lock and wipe gives you an action to take when a device goes missing. Enrolment into management is what makes all four enforceable rather than advisory.
On the identity side, the decisive control is that access reflects the current role and ends when the role does. An active account belonging to someone who left is a far larger exposure than a missing encrypted laptop, because it is an open door into live systems rather than a contained loss. The same logic applies to a permission granted for a project that finished, which is why role-based provisioning and timely revocation do more for a security posture than most tooling purchases.
Evidence is the part that turns security into something you can sell. Enterprise customers send questionnaires, insurers ask about controls, and auditors want to see that policy matches practice. Being able to produce device inventory, encryption status, and a timestamped record of when a leaver's access was removed is what shortens those conversations, and it is a by-product of running the process properly rather than a separate project.
It is worth being clear about what this is not. A device baseline and disciplined access management are foundations, not a complete security programme, and they do not replace application security, threat detection, or a policy framework. What they do is remove the failures that cause the most common incidents in distributed teams, which is where a company without an office should start.
The reason IT and employment belong in the same operation is that every IT action is triggered by an employment fact. A start date creates accounts and ships a device. A role change updates a permission set. A leaving date revokes access and starts recovery. When employment data lives with one provider and IT with another, those triggers become emails, and emails get missed.
With Employer of Record, the alignment is direct. HireCade is the legal employer, which means the start date, the role, and the termination date are already in the record that drives provisioning. A person hired in a country where you have no entity gets a compliant employment contract, local payroll, and a configured laptop with the right access, on the same timeline, at $499 per employee per month plus salary and employer contributions.
With Contractor of Record, the shape is different and the access question is more interesting. Contractors frequently use their own hardware, and in some jurisdictions supplying equipment is one of the factors that points toward employment, because independent contractors are usually expected to provide their own tools. That makes device provision a decision to take deliberately rather than by default, and it makes role-scoped access the control that actually matters, because the engagement end date is the trigger even when no laptop was ever yours.
Immigration adds a timing dimension. A relocating hire has a start date that only becomes firm when a decision arrives, and a shipping address that may change with the move. Provisioning against a moving target is exactly the kind of coordination that gets dropped when three vendors each hold one piece of the picture.
None of this requires you to buy everything from us. It does mean that if you already use HireCade for employment, the IT side inherits the data that makes it reliable, and if you use us only for IT, we will need those employment events fed to us some other way. Either works, but the first one fails less often.
HireCade IT is an operational IT function for teams that do not share an office. It covers hardware procurement, central configuration, global delivery, identity and access provisioning, endpoint security policy, device inventory, and recovery or certified disposal when someone leaves.
The organising idea is that those are all consequences of employment events rather than independent requests. A start date ships a device and creates accounts, a role change updates the permission set, and a leaving date revokes access and starts recovery.
Device work is quoted per device and ongoing management is quoted per managed seat. Hardware itself is passed through at cost, including shipping and duties, so you are not paying a margin on the laptop.
The variables that move the quote are destination country, device specification, how many applications are in scope for access management, and whether you already run an identity provider we can integrate with rather than replace.
In well-supplied markets, a configured device can be with the employee within about a week of the specification being agreed, which is why we would rather know about a hire at offer stage than at start date.
Some destinations take materially longer because of stock availability, import restrictions, or customs processing. We tell you the realistic window per country, and where it is tight we will say so rather than let a start date slip quietly.
We deliver to employees in over 130 countries, handling regional supplier differences, import duties, and the customs paperwork that comes with sending hardware across a border.
A small number of destinations are genuinely difficult because of sanctions, courier coverage, or restrictions on importing encrypted devices. Give us the country before you commit to a start date and we will confirm what is possible.
That is the normal case. We integrate with your existing identity provider and application suite where we can, because ripping out a working identity layer creates more risk than it removes.
Where a tool has no usable integration, we manage it explicitly as part of the joiner, mover, and leaver process instead of pretending it is automated. Knowing which systems are manual is what stops them being forgotten, and it is also what keeps an access review honest.
Access revocation starts from the leaving date recorded in HR, so accounts close as the exit happens rather than whenever someone gets to the ticket. The audit trail records what was removed and when.
For hardware, we arrange collection from the employee's location and then either wipe and redeploy the machine or dispose of it with a data destruction certificate. If a device is not returned, you get a clear record of what is outstanding rather than an unpleasant discovery at the next audit.
Role changes are the trigger most companies skip, and they are how permission drift starts. Access is added for the new role and almost never removed for the old one, so a long-tenured employee ends up holding entitlements nobody would grant them from scratch.
Because we provision by role rather than by request, a role change updates the whole permission set instead of appending to it. Periodic access reviews are the backstop, and they cover the systems we manage manually as well as the ones that are integrated.
Full disk encryption, screen lock policy, patching, and remote lock or wipe on every managed device, with enrolment into Apple Business Manager or Microsoft Autopilot where those are supported. Enrolment is what makes the rest enforceable rather than advisory.
This is a foundation rather than a complete security programme. It does not replace application security, threat detection, or a policy framework, but it removes the failures that cause the most common incidents in distributed teams.
Managed devices are encrypted and can be remotely locked or wiped, which means the immediate exposure is usually the hardware rather than the data. Tell us as soon as you know and we act on the device and the associated accounts together.
We then handle replacement procurement and reconfiguration so the person is working again quickly, and the incident stays in the device record for whatever reporting your insurer or customers require.
Yes, and mixed workforces are the common reason companies come to us. Contractors, EOR hires, and direct employees often need the same systems but have different contract lengths, offboarding triggers, and, in the case of contractors, sometimes their own hardware.
We treat access management as the constant and hardware provision as the variable. A contractor using their own laptop still needs role-scoped access that ends when the engagement does. It is also worth knowing that in some jurisdictions supplying equipment is one of the factors that points toward employment, so device provision for contractors is a decision to take deliberately.
We can provide the evidence that comes out of running the process properly: device inventory, encryption status, endpoint policy, and a timestamped record of when access was granted and removed. That covers a meaningful part of a typical questionnaire.
We are not a compliance certification service and we will not claim to be. Certifications, policy frameworks, and application security sit outside this service, and the honest position is that we supply evidence for the controls we operate rather than an answer to every question on the form.
Usually not, and we would not recommend it if you have infrastructure, internal tooling, or product engineering support that needs someone close to the business.
What we replace is the operational load: procurement in unfamiliar markets, cross-border shipping, provisioning, revocation, inventory, and recovery. Small teams often run entirely on us, and larger ones keep an internal IT lead who stops spending their week on courier tracking.
No. We support people who do not share an office, which means remote management of enrolled devices, identity-layer fixes, and replacement hardware procured in the employee's own market.
If you have offices, on-site infrastructure, or a walk-up support expectation, an internal team or a traditional managed service provider covers that better. Plenty of companies use one of those for their office locations and us for the countries they do not operate in.
IT is triggered by employment events, so it sits closest to the products that create them. These are the neighbouring services, the talent pools that generate new starters, and the tools that run the hiring process behind them.
We become the legal employer, so start dates and leaving dates already drive provisioning.
Engage contractors compliantly, with access that ends when the engagement does.
Relocating hires whose start date and shipping address firm up only when a decision arrives.
Everything we do, grouped by whether you need to find, hire, employ, or research people.
What each product costs, including the parts quoted per device or per seat.
Engineers whose machine specification and access profile are the most demanding on the list.
Labelling teams at scale, where access scoping matters more than hardware.
Specialists who need access to analytics and content systems, not much else.
Outbound teams whose CRM permissions are the access question that matters.
A full product team assembled for a roadmap, equipped and onboarded together.
Unlimited jobs, candidates, and seats, so an accepted offer is where provisioning starts.
Sourcing, resume ranking, and screening for roles that attract more applicants than you can read.
Expert interviewers run your technical loops so your engineers stay on product work.
A curated shortlist in your inbox every Monday for teams hiring continuously.
Talk to practitioners about how they actually run distributed IT before you change yours.
Book a free 30-minute demo and we will walk through how devices, access, and offboarding would work for the countries and employment models you actually hire in.
