Employee SaaS offboarding - how to accomplish it to ensure minimized risks and costs

We have all heard of incidents where havoc and disorder have been caused in a company by a dissatisfied employee, who was not offboarded properly. In those cases, the person used his access to company data to steal software, or retrieved and abused customer information, or purchased goods or services using the company financial data, or otherwise obtained corporate data for use in a competitor company.

Such incidents are likely to happen if a company is performing incomplete offboarding, or offboarding that is too much extended in the time. According to a research by Ilex international, 39% of the UK workforce is being offboarded within as long as 1 month - huge time which leaves plenty of time for action, if the employee is unhappy.

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A white paper by Osterman research revealed the results from research performed among 379 respondents who had recently changed jobs and who were employed on a computer-intensive job with their former employer. The research showed proof that ex-employees could access corporate data stored on file sharing and file storage services, even after being dismissed from the company. 84% of employees were still having access to storage services like Dropbox, Google drive and others.

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A quarter of this data was either sensitive or confidential company data that the ex-employees could also share with others.

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The white paper also showed that 68% of information workers stored work-related information in a personally managed file-sharing solution.

Are employees abusing the data they still have access to?

About 30% from the interviewed employees who preserved access to company tools actually logged at least once in those tools/services, but did nothing with the data accessed. However, 6% of the interviewed people shared the information accessed with others.

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The data revealed by the white paper referred to above shows that many companies are not following a sound process for offboarding employees from the SaaS they are using. We at Viio have built up a sample checklist with offboarding steps you can follow. Feel free to extend it as needed, then assign responsibilities for executing each item from the checklist, as well as for post-execution verification.

Checklist for successful employee offboarding, also ensuring complete SaaS offboarding:

• Reset the user password and grant access to the user mailbox to someone else
• Delete any login cookies
• Create an autoresponder for the user email
  

• Disconnect any third party apps from this user
• Transfer ownership of all documents owned by this user on GDrive, etc
• Transfer group or membership ownerships
• Remove the user account from G Suite services
• Remove 2-step authentication codes
• Archive the user data and if needed - make sure it will be retained for a specific future period, though, to ensure you meet any compliance requirements
  

• Collect all company hardware, keycards, etc
• Suspend the user account
• Verify the above has been completed and schedule the user’s account deletion for a specific date

With an SaaS management platform like Viio, most of the above checklist would be executed in a completely automated manner, optimizing your IT team time and efforts. Find out more on how Viio can automate your employee offboarding - request a personalized demo!