Remote Employee Offboarding Best Practices for IT

It is inevitable for organizations to see their employees leave one day. What you can do, however, is make the process secure and ensure a smooth exit. From handing over responsibilities to revoking account access, every step of the offboarding process should be executed carefully. Poor offboarding can lead to various liabilities from a security and compliance standpoint. It is estimated that security breaches originating from former employees result in costs as high as $8.19 million a year for organizations.

To mitigate these risks, MSPs need to follow certain best practices to ensure proper employee offboarding for their clients. Before we discuss these best practices, let’s explore the potential risks caused by poor offboarding.

If you aren’t sure about how to carry out seamless and secure offboarding, check out our webinar “Seamless & Secure Employee Onboarding & Offboarding for Clients” to learn how you can overcome this issue with the right tools and documentation.

Risks Associated With Poor Offboarding

Let’s face it. Employees who depart the organizations they work for don’t always leave on the best of terms. A security survey of IT workers estimated that 88% of them would abscond with sensitive data if they get fired from their jobs. However, that isn’t the only risk associated with former employees.

• Continued Access to Data: There are many instances of former employees still having access to sensitive data in an organization. If your competitors got hold of this sensitive data, you could lose your competitive advantage in the market and face severe financial losses.
• Licensing Expenses: When you forget to cancel software licenses taken in the name of an exiting employee, you may be wasting your money on unnecessary licensing expenses.
• Loss of Productivity: When employees exit an organization, they might leave behind an unattended trail of work, which could result in a hit in productivity. This can be mitigated to a great extent if proper offboarding procedures are followed.

Best Practices for Seamless Offboarding

There are five key steps you can follow to ensure seamless offboarding of your clients’ employees and secure their IT environments the right way.

1. Share the Offboarding Process: The IT offboarding process should start immediately after the HR department shares the termination email with you. You can then send an email to the employee explaining the offboarding process. You need to have an offboarding checklist that outlines the exact steps to be followed during the offboarding process.
2. Data Backup and Data Transfer: Your next step involves securing your client’s critical data. Create backups of all critical files handled by the employee and transfer the information to their reporting manager. Before the employee’s exit, you also need to review the workstation and transfer the data stored in their SaaS applications.
3. Revoke Access & Change Login Details: To prevent misuse of all company-paid applications, you need to revoke the departing employee’s access to all cloud apps. For shared accesses, you also need to change the login details to prevent potential security breaches.
4. Retrieve All Assets: Once the data is backed up and accesses are revoked, you need to retrieve all assets from the employee before their exit. In addition to workstations, you may also have to gather access cards, cell phones, computer accessories, etc. Use a checklist to note down all the assets to be retrieved.
5. Notify Other Departments: The offboarding process is almost over at this stage. All that’s left is to notify the HR, finance and other departments of the successful completion of the IT offboarding. Share this information with the departing employee’s supervisor so as to provide complete visibility.

Use our “Employee Offboarding Infographic” to make sure you didn’t miss anything during the offboarding process.

Smooth Offboarding With IT Glue

A smooth exit is critical to ensure the security of your clients’ IT infrastructure. Proper documentation can go a long way towards making the process easy and seamless. IT Glue’s automated documentation platform can help you with seamless offboarding without disrupting other operations.

To know more about how IT Glue can help you with your offboarding, download our Onboarding and Offboarding Employees for Clients Checklist.

Download now!

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