Are you worried about the harm an employee leaving your company could inflict if they had access to your private company data, account passwords, and other confidential information? When terminating employees, use these 5 Data Security Must Do’s to safeguard your critical information from insider risks.
Follow a Checklist for Offboarding Employees
It’s important to carefully prepare the offboarding procedure. Following a customized employee offboarding checklist makes sure that important data security procedures aren’t ignored or forgotten.
A combination of administrative and technical factors go towards risk mitigation during termination. Involve the appropriate HR, IT, and management stakeholders when choosing the actions that will be on your offboarding checklist to make sure that each step is covered.
Communications between Clients and Vendors
Consider a list of the recent contacts the employee has made with clients and suppliers. Create a list of contacts and inform clients and suppliers about the departure in your own terms by sending out standardized communications (preferably from someone in leadership).
In addition to giving the client or vendor a new point of contact and preferred communication channels for any upcoming questions or to address any work that is currently in flight, this gives you a fantastic method to frame the departure in a positive perspective.
Make IT Employees Aware of Upcoming Dismissals
Human resources, direct management, and IT need to collaborate to preserve data throughout termination proceedings. Giving IT staff advance warning makes sure they are prepared to promptly deprovision access to corporate accounts and watch employee computer activity in the days leading up to the employee separation for suspicious conduct.
You should also let present employees know about an employee leaving the company. This not only helps with the spread of rumors, but it will also guarantee that workers don’t become a target of social engineering schemes. Unaware employees could give the ex-employee access to company resources without authorization.
Deprovision Account and Data Access
An essential component of employee offboarding is deprovisioning. While it is possible to perform this step manually, it will take less time and ensure that the employee no longer has access to their previous accounts if the process is automated with an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution including:
• Transferring blocks of data to portable storage hardware.
• Reset the office building’s entrance codes or delete the employee’s access.
• Remove the employee from any related accounts.
• Update passwords for shared accounts.
• Remove any identities connected to employee-owned devices.
• Remove the employee from any access control security groups and revoke session tokens from Application Programming Interface/s (API), your Identity Provider (IdP), or your Single-Sign On (SSO) provider.
• Make sure the former employee doesn’t have access to it, check the remote access software and VPN credentials.
Keep a Reliable IT Inventory
You must retrieve all company assets from the employee during the offboarding procedure. A thorough inventory will guarantee that all equipment is accounted for upon departure, including laptops, PCs, USB storage devices, key cards, and other items. So that it can be trusted to keep track of lent assets, this inventory needs to be regularly maintained.
Conclusion
Data security is seriously endangered by dissatisfied employees who are about to be fired and perhaps even employees who resign. Their unhappiness may drive them to steal private information and sell it to rivals or other potential threats. You can reduce these offboarding risks by carefully monitoring the process, auditing employee computer use, and maintaining control over access to critical data.
Please reach out to us if you need more information with ensuring you have a proper employee offboarding checklist by contacting Frank Stephens at [email protected] or 847-894-6304.
