You’ve seen it on the news and on social media – big companies are laying off workers. Either you know someone who is affected or you or your business are being affected in some way. Companies around the world are laying off workers due to budget cuts and changing priorities. Layoffs are not only difficult for those involved, but also a significant cybersecurity vulnerability.
Explanation on Offboarding Checklist
Layoffs are often rapid, leaving IT departments little time to prepare for a smooth and safe exit.
When IT exits are not implemented properly, cyber risks increase even if employees leave voluntarily and with sufficient warning.
IT outsourcing is still an afterthought in many companies. This is an error. Safe exit is as important as recruiting. The good news is that by planning ahead and creating an IT audit trail, you can reduce risk and avoid headaches and vulnerabilities.
Why IT Exit Security Matters
When employees leave the workforce unprotected, the risk of internal and external cyberattacks increases.
For example, a recent report revealed that one in four employees still has access to company information from their previous employer. In addition, 87% of former employees admitted to receiving information they created themselves, such as strategic documents and presentations. Additionally, 28% said they use information created by others. This means that your company’s valuable IP and sensitive information cannot be found worldwide.
Exit Risk: Employee Access to Information
Poor IT engagement processes create opportunities for external attackers. For example, IT may not be able to properly disable email addresses, store passwords, and ignore account privileges with access. Cybercriminals can use logins to break into your organization and gain access to a lot of sensitive and important information once they’re inside. You would never know there was a problem as these old accounts are not tracked.
What is the difference between unsecured and secure IT removal?
Insecure IT decommissioning is often haphazard with inconsistent, haphazard decommissioning procedures. This often happens when companies lack IT opt-out processes and use multiple outsourcing systems to manage users, systems, applications and equipment.
On the other hand, a secure IT resignation process is efficient, systematic and always dependent on the current state of your hardware, software and computing. Look at IT security systems and you should see some of these features.
Open Communication Open Communication
IT outsourcing requires careful communication and coordination between managers, leaders, human resources, legal, IT and security team. Internal teams work together to manage and fix where terminations or breakups occur.
Centralization
Employees often use mixed devices and accounts, sometimes downloading software and applications without IT knowledge. That’s why the IT security solution takes a centralized approach to manage user identities, authorizations and credentials across all systems and employees.
Automation
You cannot manually manage all individual workers, permissions and applications – especially at large scale. By automating the process, the password may expire after a certain amount of time and you can easily remove access with the push of a button.
Final Employee Termination Checklist Template
The employee termination process has several stages. To make sure no one is left behind when leaving an employee, you can follow the instructions in this IT leave list and create your own model.
Announcement of employees leaving
Employers sometimes terminate private employees without notifying other group members. This strategy reduces disruption while allowing employees to continue attending meetings, communicating with partners, and requesting information even if they are out of the house.
Therefore, the announcement of employees’ departure is deliberate. It is also helpful to inform team members about the member’s due date and the project they are currently writing. This prevents employees from using colleagues who may not know they should leave.
Removal or restriction of access rights to the account
In rare cases, employees who do not want to leave may try to harm the company’s resources as acts of revenge. This can impact performance, hurt customer relationships and cost.
For example, a marketer may use a company’s social media account to post negative content and damage your reputation. Or, IT teams like operations managers can do more damage by shutting down critical business functions that customers rely on.
To avoid such risk, identify all systems that the employee controls or accesses, such as applications, databases, cloud environment or network equipment, as soon as they learn of their departure. Transfer members to other team members and terminate their access to coincide with the employee’s exit date.
was expected to stay for a while after an employee reported his departure. In this case, you may want to add an extra layer of permissions before allowing them to access sensitive resources. Alternatively, you can apply stricter rules for multi-factor authentication (MFA). This ensures business continuity and adds an extra layer of security to prevent your organization from being damaged by employee turnover.
In times of high change or change, it’s also a good idea to keep an eye out for conversations that have the right to show signs of harassment. You might be surprised if employees suddenly download or share information, move contacts to personal accounts, or send illegal messages to customers or partners.
Blocking remote access
Security and IT teams sometimes monitor remotely when leaving staff. Therefore, sometimes employees can access private resources using VPNs and other methods. Be sure to consider all the ways your employees can access resources, including all the people they use and their access controls.
Also Check Our New Online Video Downloader
Change all passwords of joint accounts
Employees actively share interests of partners and can manage clearing or monitoring activities. These shared accounts make it impossible to track the activities of individual users. If your organization uses shared accounts, be sure to change passwords or create new accounts when members leave.
444 5. Revoke Email Access
Email systems contain many important information such as sensitive information and contacts important for internal communication. Often times, employees continue to access email after they no longer work for the company.
Remove email entries at the end of the employee’s due date. Also, monitor outgoing employee accounts and set up emails to send to incoming requests from customers or clients. This way you don’t confuse customers and affect future projects.
Check forwarding to
Sometimes employees can forward calls to other accounts such as mobile numbers. Disgruntled employees can send phone calls to disgruntled candidates.
Therefore, make sure that the telephone number is not linked to an external number and that all machines are working as designed. Also, deprovision the employee’s voice email account.
Remove information from internal files
Companies are often slow to replace internal files, especially during major layoffs or restructuring. Unfortunately, this can give the impression that former team members are still with the company.
It is important to extract all information sent to previous employees from files such as contact lists, websites, social media channels, documents and drawings.
444 8. Physical Control Updates
Physical access updates are also required to prevent ex-employees from entering offices, data centers or warehouses. Changing codes on doors and locks, revoking permits, and removing physical equipment or equipment used by employees.
Collection of Company Equipment
Employees may refuse to return work equipment, especially if it is used for their own work or other activities. Most devices store data locally, which makes them a liability. These devices are expensive to replace.
For this reason, it is beneficial to monitor company equipment such as laptop, desktop computer, mobile device, tablet, camera, external storage devices.
Back up and protect important information
For some former employees, it may be tempting to use important information as a bargaining chip when negotiating new, particularly important or useful information with an employer. At worst, people can delete data or hold a ransom for more money.
You can avoid this risk by asking participants to keep bank records and regularly back up and verify important data. Local data restrictions remove the threat of unscrupulous or careless account holders.
Create forensic computer images
Security issues can be difficult to find. Sometimes, they don’t show up for weeks or months after the employee leaves.
Create forensic images of computer workers and store these images securely after employees leave the company. Doing so facilitates future investigations and helps hold employees accountable for future security or data breaches.
Working during network maintenance
IT must stay vigilant after ex-employees leave the company. One way to do this is to install a security information and event management (SIEM) solution to detect suspicious behavior and restrict access. Network monitoring should be done 24/7 and all network communication devices should be monitored.
Well-Executed Process
It’s easy to miss the last point on our checklist, because it should come as no surprise that the interview is about job applicants, not job quitters. Exit interviews are the last opportunity for companies to communicate with employees before they leave. That’s why it’s important for security and IT administrators to be available to ask questions and review things at the last minute.
At this time, the employee must sign a statement confirming the return of all assets of the company. Employees should also be told not to access any machine, file or account and be warned of the consequences.
Checklist for Retired IT Executives
You should be more careful when separating certain employees, such as administrators, managers, developers, and technicians, from professional security or performance. These individuals have access to critical resources that, if misused, could jeopardize the sustainability of your organization.
With that in mind, here are some additional tips to add to your list when leaving a high-risk IT workforce.
Exchange information first
Team leaders should meet with outgoing employees to ask questions and share information. During this meeting, outgoing staff should gain access to all sensitive devices they control and share information about the whereabouts of jewelery evidence.
Involve Your Legal Team
For sensitive processes and data files, it’s a good idea to involve the legal department when some employees leave. Lawyers can advise on what questions to ask and assist with appropriate documentation (such as computerized evidence).
Safe crew evacuation starts with a good start
Finally, safe crew transportation is easier if you get the crew on board in the first place.
This should establish a minimum level of security and allow people to access the information they need to do their jobs. It’s also a good idea to use a Privileged Access Management (PAM) business solution when creating authorizations and settings to manage, rotate and expire certificates, accounts, and connect.
In addition, administrators and security administrators must have access to the system and personnel. Organizations should have policies to reduce unauthorized SaaS services and shadow IT. Also, establish appropriate data usage policies and prevent employees from storing sensitive data on unsecured devices or in unauthorized locations.
To ensure you are safe at the beginning and end of an employee’s life, be sure to check the attendant information for this checklist.