When employees leave your business, there is a lot of work to do to make sure there is a safe and seamless handover. Managers are focusing on handover meetings, returning equipment, and HR paperwork. But with customer and business data at stake, there should be more focus on a prompt and secure digital offboarding.
Without the right steps in place, former staff may still have access to sensitive information, email accounts, or cloud systems. This presents some serious risks: data breaches, compliance failures, and sometimes malicious misuse of company resources.
So, how can businesses improve digital offboarding?
Standardise the offboarding process.
Every organisation should make a clear, repeatable checklist for when employees leave. This ensures that nothing is forgotten, regardless of whether the departure is planned or a response to misconduct issues.
The checklist should include things such as:
• The removal of access to email, cloud services, and internal systems.
• The recovery of company devices such as laptops, phones, or storage drives.
• Redirecting or archiving business communications, such as forwarding emails to the employee’s line manager.
Centralise user account management.
Businesses usually operate by juggling dozens of platforms that perform specific functions. For instance, your employee might have access to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Adobe Creative Cloud, a host of project management tools, and more besides. Manually disabling each account is not only time-consuming but infrequently used software or platforms might go overlooked. Mistakes are bound to be made.
Using a central identity and access management (IAM) system to manage all user permissions from one place is a great solution. With a single action, you can deactivate access across multiple platforms and services.
Prioritise data security.
Departing employees may have copies of documents or access to shared drives. Without proper controls in place, you could watch confidential data waltz out of the door with them. You need to take some protective steps:
• Ensure that your files are stored on company-owned systems rather than any personal devices.
• Where there are shared passwords (your Wi-Fi or social media accounts for instance) change them immediately.
• Remove and reassign ownership of documents and project files to active and appropriate staff.
Communicate clearly with staff.
Not all risks are malicious or intentional. Sometimes former employees log into systems simply because they still can. Clear communication ensures staff understand the offboarding process and why the security steps are necessary to protect the business and other employees.
You could pair your offboarding process with an IT policy that all employees agree to upon joining the business. That way there are no shocks, and the process feels standard and expected.
Work with IT Support specialists.
Much like anything else at the end of an employment, digital offboarding can be complex; even more so if your business uses a mix of legacy systems, remote devices, and cloud tools.
If you partner with an IT support provider, they will ensure that access is revoked quickly, securely, and in line with any compliance requirements. After all it is the responsibility of the provider to protect business and customer data as well as maintain your systems.
Offboarding is an unfortunate necessity.
Unfortunately, it is rare that all of your employees will donate all of their career to your company and never retire. Digital offboard is necessary, and it’s a business-critical safeguard. By implementing the above suggestions you can protect your business data, reputation, and bottom line.
Onboarding gets employees into your systems, but offboarding ensures they leave without taking your business with them.
For more information on digital offboarding, contact us on 01327 300 311 or email [email protected] with your enquiry.
Share this post: