If and when an employee departs from your business, they should go through a comprehensive offboarding process. This process should include the physical handoff of keys, laptops, and any other assets or resources they used during their employment with your business. While it’s easy enough to collect these physical items, it’s harder to shore up your business on the digital side of things.
If you find yourself seeing ex-employees active on company solutions or using your resources despite having left the business, you want to address it immediately—yesterday, in fact. This is a security issue that could result in major problems, many of which could have legal consequences.
Addressing the Risks
For all you know, your former employees could be going about their day-to-day business with no clue that they have company data or access to important accounts that was never revoked.
This is especially true for businesses that use Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, as the line between personal and professional data is blurred. Your former employees could accidentally expose your business’ data without even realizing it. Or worse, you get a disgruntled former employee who blatantly puts your company’s data at risk, stealing resources, selling client lists, or disrupting operations.
Of course, this can and should be prevented with an offboarding process—but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Managing Shared Accounts
For businesses that utilize shared login credentials for certain services and accounts, this becomes even more problematic.
If you have passwords used by multiple people, there’s a chance they could depart from your business with access to that account simply because you don’t want to change the password and disrupt the workflow for literally everyone else in the organization who depends on it. Now imagine if that former employee exposes that credential to a threat. Your business is suddenly at risk due to one, to be quite frank, bad decision.
It’s a best practice to close your digital doors to former employees as soon as possible with a comprehensive offboarding checklist, which we have provided below.
Your Offboarding Checklist
This checklist should be considered a list of non-negotiable tasks when any employee leaves your organization:
- Immediately disable the employee’s accounts
- Terminate all active sessions
- Wipe all personal mobile devices to remove only company data
- Revoke all access to shared groups or folders
- Convert the email to a shared mailbox that forwards to the employee’s manager
Ultimately, your goal is to cut off access to former work accounts, data, devices, and anything else your business provided for the former employee.
If you’re ready to take onboarding seriously, Lantek can help. Learn more by contacting us at (610) 683-6883.