The ultimate offboarding checklist for IT departments

Offboarding employees is the process of transitioning an employee when they leave your business. In this era where remote working is at an all-time high, it’s extremely important for IT departments to have an exit process in place to make sure their company’s network and data are secure.

All too often, departing employees retain access to IT infrastructure that they could take advantage of – especially if they leave on a sour note!

If managers fail to closely monitor the exit procedure for their employees, their employees may still have access to the organisation’s network or data. Deactivating accounts and permissions must be ensured once an employee has departed.

If your business relies on cloud-based file sharing platforms, it’s even easier for malicious or disgruntled ex-employees to cause issues. Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate the risk departing employees pose to your network, and the simplest one is to use an employee offboarding checklist.

Here’s our ultimate IT checklist for employee offboarding:

• Obtain exit form from HR with termination dates
• Disable the employee’s account and reset their password
• Remove access to software licenses, databases, and servers
• Revoke all active sessions
• Remove employees from all groups that they have access to
• Remove any existing rules that the user may have set on their mailbox
• Forward employee email and set-up out of office message
• Reset shared passwords
• Recover company devices and physical assets
• Inform HR request completed
  
  

Successful offboarding begins with thoughtful onboarding, which can be simplified by adopting the Zero Trust model.

Zero Trust is a strategic approach to cybersecurity that was developed to embrace the hybrid workplace, and protect people, devices, apps, and data, wherever they’re located. The model assigns privilege based on the least amount of access required to perform a task (need-basis).