No matter what you do to boost employee morale and retention, some of your employees will eventually move on to other positions. When this happens, you need to keep your company’s data safe.
The average cost of an infrastructure data breach is $4.82 million. You can prevent data breaches and mishandled records. With a few simple steps, you can protect your data after an employee leaves and keep your customer records secure.
9 Steps to Protect Your Data After an Employee Leaves
When an employee leaves your company, you should already have a plan in place with your IT and human resources (HR) departments about the next steps. For example, the employee should return any cell phones, monitors, computers, and laptops issued by the company.
Employees take data for many reasons. Often, they don’t realize they’re taking your data because it was saved automatically to the sent file of their email or inadvertently uploaded to their cloud storage. Because of bring your own (BYO) devices, many employees have a great deal of corporate data stored on their devices without realizing it.
Some employees intentionally take data because they don’t think it’s wrong. For instance, an employee may bring information about a client if they were the one who found and developed that client relationship. If they created a new product or service, they may feel like the data belongs to them.
Finally, some employees take data because they have malicious intent. They may be angry at a company for firing them, or they might want to steal confidential information for personal profit. This might be a tiny portion of lost data, but it can cause a significant amount of damage.
Fortunately, most of your employees aren’t actively trying to sell your data or act in a malicious way. This doesn’t mean they won’t accidentally reveal sensitive information by acting in a careless manner. If you want to protect your data after an employee leaves, you need to adopt the following steps at your business.
1. Give Employees Access As Needed
Instead of worrying about how to protect data after an employee is fired, be proactive and limit who can access your data. You should only let employees access data if they genuinely need it to do their job. Your workplace should never allow free-for-all access to sensitive information.
With the help of your IT team, think about the kind of controls you should put in place. Initially, you can take a conservative approach and limit data access. As you gain a better understanding of who needs access to different types of information, you can always adopt a more lenient approach.
2. Password Protect Data
Even if your policies limit data access, you may still end up with a problem if you don’t have a way to enforce your policies.
Makios Cloud Security for Passwords
or a similar program can help you centralize credentials and control who can access different things.
If you plan on firing or laying off an employee, sort out their data access before you give them the news. You can revoke their credentials several hours before you terminate a team member.
Since this process can sometimes take a few hours, it is incredibly important to do it beforehand. Otherwise, your disgruntled, former employee may have several hours to steal or harm your data before they’re locked out of the system.
3. Keep Track of Websites Used
Do you know which websites your employees use? If you don’t know what sites your employees are on for their job, you won’t be able to limit their data access when they quit.
To protect data before an employee is laid off, you need to methodically log all of the frequently used websites for each employee. Then, you can use this information to block former employees from accessing sensitive information after they leave.
4. Set up Single Sign-on (SSO)
Single sign-on (SSO) systems can help to protect your data after an employee leaves. With this type of system, a user enters a single set of credentials to access any data or cloud-based app they want. Without the SSO password, they can’t get behind your company’s firewall to reach this information.
This kind of system is ideal because you can easily cut off an employee’s access as soon as they are terminated. Once their SSO is turned off, they can’t reach anything located behind your company’s firewall.
Basically, you can think of SSO as the key to your company. You want to place as many of your company’s apps, documents, and information behind this firewall as possible. Once this is done, you can simply lock up your company’s information by taking away the employee’s key.
5. Keep Access to Employee Profiles
While it’s a good idea to protect data after an employee is fired, you don’t want to be too hasty. Eventually, you may need to access your employee’s profile and documents again.
Because of this, you don’t want to delete the employee’s old profile. If the computer is a part of the domain, you’ll have access to the profile by default. When there isn’t server integration, you need to make a backup account, so you can access all of the information you need without having to hack into the employee’s old computer.
6. Don’t Allow Employees to Use Personal Hardware
While we live in the era of BYOD, BYOD policies are inherently risky. You should never let employees use personal hardware because these devices can be compromised or stolen. Additionally, you can’t confiscate an employee’s personal laptop or cell phone when they leave.
If an employee uses their own devices, they get to keep them when they quit or get fired. This is a clear risk to your company’s security. In many cases, it will also violate any cybersecurity-related insurance policies you may have.
Even if your employees are completely trustworthy, they are still a huge risk. Many data breaches occur because of carelessness, so an employee doesn’t have to be malicious to cost your firm money.
In addition, you have no way of knowing which security measures are used on your employee’s device. They may also use apps or download files that put their device’s security at risk. Even before an employee transitions to a different employer, their device can harm your company’s security.
7. Disable Employee Access Before They Are Laid Off
If you plan on firing someone, you should take steps to protect data before an employee is laid off. While most employees aren’t malicious, this precaution can prevent malicious actors from stealing your company’s information. A resentful employee can deliberately corrupt your data, delete customer information or orders, or steal data to sell to a competitor.
When an employee is allowed ongoing access to your data, it can lead to some of the following issues.
- You can lose your firm’s intellectual property.
- Customer data may be deliberately revealed or inadvertently become a part of a data breach.
- You may lose a competitive advantage.
- Your business may lose regulated data.
- You may be sued because of data exfiltration and the loss of intellectual property.
The best way to protect your data after an employee leaves is by being proactive. If an employee will be leaving involuntarily, you should cut off their access before you tell them about the termination or layoff. By using an SSO, you can make the cut-off process faster and easier for your IT department.
8. Create Confidentiality Policies in Employment Contracts
When you onboard new employees, they should be given employee contracts about confidential data. You should add clear confidentiality provisions in each contract. These provisions should cover the protection of your sensitive information during and after the employee’s tenure.
While someone can still act maliciously and sell your firm’s information, these provisions create an additional barrier. If an employee does violate those provisions, you will at least have a legal basis for pursuing a case against them.
9. Encrypt All of Your Data
You are responsible for the security of your company’s information. To protect your data, you need to encrypt information when it is in transit, at rest, and in use. Additionally, employees should also be able to use manual encryption to protect sensitive information in their emails.
Encryption might not be a perfect remedy, but it adds an additional layer of protection. When a company uses encryption for its data, it can prevent a great deal of data loss from happening when someone quits working for a company.
Protect Your Company’s Data After Terminations
Whether an employee quits voluntarily or gets fired, they represent a risk to your firm’s security. Even well-intentioned employees can accidentally take data with them or cause a security breach. You need to figure out the best way to protect your data after an employee leaves.
If you are uncertain about how to protect your business, Makios can help. Our team can help you disable or suspend employees’ access following a termination. To learn more about how we can help, visit our website today.
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