After an employee exits your business, there’s a chance they might still have access to your company data for an indefinite amount of time, as well as your office premises.  According to research conducted by Kaspersky Lab, 25 percent of South African employees still have access to a former employer’s data. Clearly, there is a need for local businesses to be more vigilant.

This is not to say former employees will make use of your data for unscrupulous purposes or break into your office. However, leaving data accessible for them when they don’t need it anymore could make your company vulnerable to data breaches or cyber attacks, which are an unfortunate reality in this day and age. You also don’t want your former employees to make off with any keys or access tags that might fall into the wrong hands. 

It’s therefore important to ensure that any access point an employee might have had while working for you is now patched up, and there are several steps you can take to achieve this. So, when an employee leaves, consider these important aspects of your business.

Work email and cloud applications

Your first step should be to block your former employee’s access to their work mailbox. This would have been a primary port of call for them when sharing company information and they won’t need to use it anymore. In fact, in the days or weeks leading up to your employee, make a note to disable their email once they have left. If you have an IT team that takes care of matters such as this, then make sure they get on the job promptly.

But it’s not just the email accounts you have to consider, as they could also be linked to a cloud application that’s shared by the whole business. Your company should be making use of one of these applications for the purpose of storing important work material. Two prevalent examples would be Google Drive and Dropbox Business, which each employee would be able to access using their work email addresses. So when you’re disabling an employee’s email account, you’re also blocking their access to important cloud-based data.

Office tools and programs

It’s likely your company uses a range of useful online tools and programs in order to increase workplace efficiency. There are tools like Asana which, like the cloud applications mentioned above, are linked to company emails and would therefore be made inaccessible just by deleting those email accounts.

However, there are some programs which everyone in the company will access using one set of login details. A marketing company will have its own Google Analytics account, for example. Important client information exists on that account, and you don’t want former employees to still have access to that information after they leave.

The way around this problem simply involves changing your company’s passwords to these tools and programs while ensuring their access was also revoked. Doing this every time an employee leaves might sound like a tedious task, but it’s necessary if you want to protect your company’s and your client’s data.

Office premises

Your company can be infiltrated onsite as well as online. When an employee leaves, make sure they have returned everything they used to access your office premises, from keys and cards to office tags. If you forget to ask for these back there’s a higher risk of your office being broken into and equipment being stolen.

One great way to improve regulating who gains access to your office and who doesn’t is to deploy an access control system. By investing in a solution like this you’re securing your business in a more thorough manner. Nashua’s very own access control solutions replace traditional security measures such as keys and passwords with convenient RF cards and innovative biometric scanning, which comes in the form of fingerprint reading and face recognition.

There are various measures you can take to keep your company’s data and your office premises safe and secure after an employee leaves. By blocking access to information, changing passwords to necessary programs and tools and improving your access control solutions you’ll boost the security of your business.