The offboarding process, which involves the departure of employees, contractors, and service providers from an organization, is fraught with challenges and potential risks. According to a recent survey by Osterman Research, 69% of organizations have experienced a loss of data or knowledge when employees leave. This alarming finding highlights a significant gap in the offboarding process that needs to be addressed.
One of the main difficulties in the offboarding process is the conflicting goals of ensuring access for business continuity and terminating access to maintain data integrity as required by compliance regulations. The existing offboarding processes used to navigate these conflicting goals are often not standardized, automated, or easily monitored. This lack of visibility makes it difficult for security and identity teams to track what employees accessed, why, using what identity, and for how long. As a result, they must invest time and resources to uncover and decipher the employee identity trail, causing disruptions to business processes.
The offboarding process is generally perceived as an interrupter and obstructer of business continuity. In an effort to retain the knowledge accumulated by departing employees and ensure a smooth transition for their replacements, organizations often create stale accounts with grace periods during which the employee’s credentials can still be used to access the organization’s networks. However, once the employee is gone, the account may go unmonitored, making it an attractive target for malicious actors. Additionally, if the employee has been forwarding emails to their personal email account or accessing work emails from personal devices, this creates further vulnerabilities and challenges for the organization.
The rigidity of existing offboarding processes can frustrate business executives and impede business operations. Security teams are responsible for manually terminating all access privileges, including access to various systems, applications, databases, and physical facilities. Manual user access reviews are also sporadic and may lack critical business context, further hindering business operations. These manual processes are prone to human error, especially in large organizations with multiple systems and access points, potentially leading to security breaches or unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Another challenge in the offboarding process is the difficulty of locating and de-provisioning all employee accounts, especially when employees have used multiple digital identities across different platforms and systems. Furthermore, not all accounts and users may be actual employees, with external contractors or anomalous entities often being forgotten, untracked, and overlooked. It is crucial to identify, review, and deactivate or transfer each of these accounts for a proper offboarding process.
To streamline the offboarding process and mitigate associated risks, organizations should consider implementing the following measures:
1. Establish well-defined, automated, and adaptable offboarding procedures that go beyond checklists. This requires strong collaboration between HR, IT, and security teams to ensure a smooth and efficient process.
2. Ensure visibility into the organization’s entire suite of identities and users at any given time. This will help identify and manage all identities and entities, even after they leave the organization, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
3. Implement automatic, ongoing audits, provide employee education about data security policies, and utilize dedicated identity solutions. These measures will help mitigate the risks associated with offboarding from an identity security perspective, ensuring that business can continue safely and securely.
By adopting these strategies, organizations can enhance their offboarding processes, protect against data loss, and maintain the integrity of their systems and sensitive information. Streamlining the offboarding process will not only improve security but also contribute to the overall efficiency of the business.