Are Your Ex-Employees Still in Your System?

When an employee leaves your business, they go through (or they should, at least) a comprehensive offboarding process where you collect their keys, laptops, and other assets you gave them to do their jobs. You may have collected these physical keys, but certainly not their digital keys. You might still see them pop up in the instant messaging app, or you might find recent activity from their account in your shared drive, all of which is problematic.

If you’re not careful, ex-employees might still be using company resources for their own personal use, and this can create a serious security risk for your business—not to mention the legal ramifications should anything bad happen.

Security Risks Associated with Ex-Employees

Imagine that your former employees are just going about their day-to-day lives, only to accidentally expose your business to security risks.

It’s not unheard of for business data to linger on employee devices long after their employment with a business ends, and while it’s not always intentional, it is most definitely a problem that should be addressed. You might even experience issues with disgruntled former employees engaging in sabotage. They might have left your business with a bone to pick, and if they realize their passwords still work, they could cause all kinds of problems, either by stealing your client list or selling it to your competitors.

This is a problem you don’t want to deal with—and it’s one that can easily be prevented with a sound offboarding process.

Shared Accounts Create Even More Issues

Now imagine that the employee isn’t the only one using login credentials for a shared service or application.

The password for that service is used by multiple people, including the one who just walked out the door, never to be seen again… Unless, of course, they show up in the activity feed for this app or service. While it might seem ridiculous to change a password used by your entire staff, think about it. What would happen if the former employee accidentally exposed that credential to a threat? It could put your entire business at risk.

In general, you don’t want to leave these digital doors open to former employees, and we’ll show you how to close them.

Here’s Your Proactive Offboarding Checklist

If your business is having trouble with offboarding employees, we’ve got just what you need: a list of non-negotiable tasks we like to call an offboarding checklist:

• Immediately disable the employee’s accounts
• Terminate all active sessions
• Wipe all personal mobile devices to only remove company data
• Revoke all access to shared groups or folders
• Convert the email to a shared mailbox that forwards to the employee’s manager

In the end, the employee simply has no access to any of their former work accounts, data, devices, or otherwise—exactly the way they shouldn’t.

Preferred can help you implement this strategy for your business. To learn more, call us at 708-781-7110.