The Hidden Costs of Remote Team IT Management (And How to Avoid Them)
Starting in 2025, remote teams will no longer be a predicted future trend, they will be a necessity for all growth companies. Hiring will be cross-border by default, particularly in the fields of technology, operations, and customer support. Yet the systems used to manage those teams often remain fragmented and reactive.
Remote team IT management to many leaders seems to be simple: ship the laptop, issue the logins, and work commences. However, at scale, the logic in these assumptions starts to degrade. Through operational processes there are unrecognized ‘quiet leaks’ that become problematic, access delays, devices left unmanaged, security gaps, and delays created by processes that remain manual.
The most insidious of these problems are that they are rarely tracked in a single area. The costs of poor remote team IT management are productivity decreases, escalating risk, employee dissatisfaction, and stagnated growth. These costs are often unnoticed until consequences arise within leadership.
The True Cost of Poor Remote Team IT Management
2.1. Productivity Loss from IT Downtime
Common remote employee obstacles such as device provisioning delays, VPN outages, and access configuration errors make gaining and sustaining new employee engagement a challenge when new hires arrive onboarded but unable to access core productivity software. Without proper device tracking & management, these issues become harder to detect, resolve, and prevent at scale.
Data from StrongDM shows that 43% of new hires wait over a week for basic workstation logistics and tools, while 18% wait over two months for necessary work equipment.
For example, a remote developer onboarding into a SaaS team without an allocated laptop or access credentials on the first few days. Each day without access is a day of paid non-productive time, causing sprint delays, team dependencies disruptions, and early disengagement. While it may appear as a simple starting onboarding delay, it is compounding to a more long-term impact on the overall team productivity.
2.2. Security Risks That Multiply in Remote Environments
Remote work significantly increases the attack surface. In 2025, 73% of remote employees use personal devices for work, many lacking enterprise-grade protection. This widespread use of unmanaged devices has turned what was once a theoretical risk into a daily cybersecurity challenge.
Some of the attack vectors involved include:
- Weakly encrypted home Wi-Fi
- Family shared devices
- Unpatched operating systems
- Remote worker-focused phishing campaigns
- Unmonitored endpoint weakness
One compromised laptop can now threaten multiple SaaS systems, credentialing, cloud storage, internal documents, and financial systems. The risk is financial, but also reputational and regulatory.
2.3. Hidden Onboarding and Offboarding Costs
In a distributed setting, onboarding and offboarding looks straightforward, but in reality, there are large costs and breaches of security.
Usually, organizations deal with:
- Overlapping software licenses
- Devices that are never returned
- Inaccessible employee accounts that keep access for a number of weeks
- Lack of oversight regarding asset ownership
A typical example from audits is that a previous employee in sales is still able to access CRM and shared folders in the cloud while being gone for a while. The organization is still unprotected from potential security issues even if there are no bad intentions. The company is wasting money in a significant way, but there is even more of a liability from a security standpoint.
2.4. IT Team Burnout and Operational Overhead
Every missing device or delayed access request is the result of a reactive IT team operating. Technical teams are distracted from strategic system improvement by manual spreadsheets, international vendor coordination, and never-ending support tickets.
For example, Milieu Insights, a fast-growing market research company operating across six Southeast Asian countries, faced delays in device procurement, onboarding, and ISO compliance due to fragmented IT processes. These inefficiencies contributed directly to IT team burnout. By implementing Esevel’s MDM, global hardware support and centralized device procurement, they cut onboarding time in half, accelerated IT procurement by 50% and automated asset tracking, freeing the IT team to focus on strategic initiatives.
The Management Blind Spot: Insufficient Control and Visibility
The majority of businesses have a disjointed understanding of their remote IT environment, including device procurement. The truth cannot be found in a single source for:
- Which device belongs to whom?
- Which systems are accessible to whom?
- Which assets are retired, lost, or in use?
- Which international security standards are applicable?
Leadership instead uses spreadsheets, helpdesk tickets, disjointed vendor portals, and manual approvals. This works for a short while on a small scale, but when it comes to rapid hiring and international operations, it breaks down.
Visibility is the main issue.
Risk cannot be controlled without real-time visibility; it can only be identified after harm has been done. Generally speaking, leadership is already behind a risk if they are unable to recognize it in real time.
How These Hidden Costs Directly Impact Business Growth
A bad remote team IT departments are not the only places where IT management occurs. It immediately reduces the speed of business:
- Long onboarding periods lower offer acceptance rates, which results in slower hiring velocity.
- Poor early employee experience: engagement and retention are shaped by initial impressions.
- Reduced employee trust: internal operations are compromised by system instability.
- Access controls and device policies are now standard due diligence requirements due to failed audits and postponed enterprise deals.
What I Learned: How to Avoid These Hidden Costs
Through years of observing distributed teams at scale, several principles consistently separate resilient organizations from reactive ones.
1. Centralize Remote Team IT Management Early
A single dashboard for:
- Devices
- Users
- Access
- Lifecycle status
This changes everything. It becomes instantly clear who owns which device in which country, what condition that device is in, and which systems each user can access. The amount of operational friction this removes is difficult to overstate.
2. Automate Onboarding, Offboarding, and Access Control
The majority of delays and security flaws are caused by manual provisioning. Automation makes it possible:
- Same-day user configuration
- Revocation of access immediately upon departure
- Lockdown of the device in a matter of minutes
- Regular enforcement of security
By 2025, same-day onboarding will be the norm for talent worldwide and no longer a benefit.
3. Standardize Devices and Security Policies Globally
Fragmented vendor stacks create fragmented security. Standardizing:
- Device models
- Operating systems
- Endpoint security
- Encryption and monitoring policies
reduces operational inconsistency and compliance exposure. One global standard is far easier to secure than six regional variations.
For example, Bunker, an FP&A SaaS startup with a distributed team across Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the US, struggled with inconsistent device security and compliance. Esevel’s JumpCloud integration, device procurement, and centralized compliance support enabled 2× faster device provisioning and real-time IT visibility, ensuring standardized policies and smooth operations across all locations.
4. Build IT into Your People Operations Strategy
IT is no longer just a support function. It is deeply tied to:
- Employee experience
- Performance enablement
- Retention
- Business continuity
- Regulatory trust
Organizations that treat IT as a strategic pillar, not a background cost center, experience fewer disruptions and more predictable scaling.
The Cost of Ignoring Remote IT Is Always Higher
Companies always pay for remote team IT management. The only question is when and how painfully. They can invest early in centralized systems, automation, and visibility. Or they can pay later through:
- Security breaches
- Productivity loss
- Employee churn
- Audit failures
- Brand and reputation damage
- Operational burnout
From a leadership perspective, the lesson is clear: remote team IT management is no longer an operational detail, it is a growth strategy. In 2025, the organizations that scale safely and confidently are not just the ones with great talent. They are the ones with the infrastructure to protect, enable, and sustain that talent, anywhere in the world.
—-
Author
I’m Yuying Deng, CEO of Esevel, with over a decade of experience across strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and high-growth startups. With a legal and MBA background, I lead Esevel’s mission to deliver a global IT management solution that helps companies with distributed teams manage their devices, people, and applications in one centralized platform.