How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

Remote Work Is Breaking Old IT Assumptions

For decades, corporate IT was designed around a simple model: employees sit in the same office, and they stay with the company for years. That model is collapsing. Workers now log in from home offices, coffee shops, trains, and client sites. Many of those workers are not full-time employees at all—they are contractors, freelancers, vendors, and partners who join for a project and leave when it's done.

This shift creates two practical problems for IT teams. First, internal tools must be reachable from anywhere, on any device, without the friction of legacy VPN clients. Second, onboarding and offboarding must become fast and repeatable because they now happen constantly, not just when a new employee starts.

Cloudflare built Cloudflare for Teams to address exactly these problems. The following approach—replacing VPNs, centralizing app discovery, and supporting external identities—shows how remote and mixed workforces can be made productive without sacrificing security.

Retire the VPN

VPNs were never designed for the way teams work now. They slow down laptops, they break on mobile devices, and they put a heavy support burden on IT. Cloudflare's answer is Cloudflare Access: instead of putting internal tools on a private network, you put them anywhere—on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds—and secure them at Cloudflare's edge.

When a user requests a hostname protected by Access, that request stops at Cloudflare's network first. Access then checks the request against the list of users allowed to reach the application. Identity is verified through the identity provider the company already uses, with integrations for OneLogin, Okta, Azure AD, G Suite, and others. If the user hasn't logged in yet, they're prompted to authenticate at the configured provider.

This model has real-world traction. Udaan, India's largest B2B e-commerce platform, used Access to avoid deploying a VPN altogether. As the company expanded to new locations and grew a user base spanning contractors, employees, interns, and vendors, the IT team gave them secure access without issuing corporate accounts or manually handling onboarding. Logging into SaaS apps and private applications looks and feels the same for every user, every time.

"VPNs are frustrating and lead to countless wasted cycles for employees and the IT staff supporting them. Furthermore, conventional VPNs can lull people into a false sense of security. With Cloudflare Access, we have a far more reliable, intuitive, secure solution that operates on a per user, per access basis. I think of it as Authentication 2.0 — even 3.0." — Amod Malviya, Cofounder and CTO, Udaan

Make Apps Discoverable

Access alone doesn't solve everything. New employees—especially those joining a large organization—face another challenge: figuring out which of the dozens of internal and SaaS tools they actually need. A dashboard that lists every app a user can access goes a long way toward reducing that ramp-up time.

This is the purpose of App Launch, a feature of Cloudflare Access. Once enabled, App Launch gives end users a single graphical dashboard for every application protected by Access. A single click connects them to any app behind the service. IT teams setting up contractors can send them a custom launchpad of exactly what they need on day one, rather than expecting them to discover those tools on their own.

Authenticate Contractors Against Their Own Identity

The old IT model assumed a single source of truth: the corporate directory. That works when everyone is a full-time employee. But contractors and partners often join for short, isolated projects, and requiring them to get a corporate identity is slow, wasteful, and makes them feel like second-class users.

Some organizations try workarounds: issuing VPN credentials to temporary users, stitching together federation between different SSO providers, or manually creating corporate accounts for one-off projects. All of these burn time on both sides—IT spends hours on setup, and contractors wait before they can do any real work.

Cloudflare Access addresses this by supporting multiple identity providers at the same time. It integrates with services like Gmail and GitHub that don't require a corporate subscription. External users can log in with accounts they already own and get the same ease of use as internal employees. Administrators avoid the ongoing burden of creating and deleting accounts for every project—a task that in legacy systems was a regular part of operating a modern, mixed workforce.

Getting Started at No Cost

Organizations can start with Cloudflare for Teams at no charge. Until September 1, 2020, Cloudflare is making its Teams products free for small businesses. The goal is to help companies that adopt work-from-home policies in response to COVID-19 maintain business continuity. Applications are available at cloudflare.com/smallbusiness.