When an employee leaves your business, asking for their office keys and name badge is a normal routine. You want to make sure your physical building is safe. But taking back their digital keys is much harder.
In a modern business, an employee might have access to your email system, your client database, your financial records, and dozens of apps. If you do not shut off this access right away, your business is at risk. A former worker could steal a list of your best customers, delete important files out of anger, or accidentally leave a backdoor open for hackers.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), businesses need to stop treating offboarding as an afterthought. Their experts note that organizations must handle offboarding with the same deliberate care they use for hiring. If your company lacks a clear, repeatable plan, critical security steps will inevitably fall through the cracks.
This guide will show you employee offboarding best practices to keep your business safe.
The Real Risk of Leftover Accounts
Many business owners think a data breach only comes from foreign hackers guessing passwords. The truth is much closer to home.
When you forget to delete an old employee’s account, it becomes a “ghost account.” Nobody is watching it, but it still has access to your company data. Hackers love ghost accounts. If a hacker cracks a former employee’s weak password, they can walk right into your network.
The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report shows that attacks using stolen or compromised login information take the longest to find. On average, it takes companies nearly 300 days to realize a hacker is inside their system using an old account. That gives criminals months to steal your money and data.
Protecting accounts after an employee leaves is a step you cannot afford to skip. Here is exactly how to do it.
Step 1: Stop Access at the Source
The first step in secure offboarding is cutting off access to your main company network.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) states that removing an employee’s network access should happen the exact moment their employment ends. You should not wait until the end of the week.
Most modern companies use a central directory to manage logins. If you use a central system, your IT team can click one button to lock the user out of the main network.
- Change passwords instantly: Do not ask the employee to log out. Force their account to log out and change the password immediately.
- Disable, do not delete: Never delete an employee's account on their last day. If you delete the account, you might lose all the files and emails attached to it. Instead, you want to "disable" or "suspend" the account. This stops the person from logging in, but it saves the data for your company to review.
Step 2: Handle Emails and Files the Smart Way
Once the employee is locked out, you have to decide what to do with their email address. If clients are still emailing that person, you do not want those messages to bounce back. You could lose sales or miss important customer service requests.
This is where a system like Microsoft 365 shines. Microsoft 365 has a feature called a “Shared Mailbox.”
When someone leaves, your IT provider can convert their email account into a shared mailbox. This does two great things for your business:
- It lets a manager or another team member read the old emails and reply to new ones.
- It frees up the software license. You stop paying the monthly fee for the employee who left, saving you money.
KT Connections helps many local businesses set up Microsoft 365 the right way, so saving emails and saving money happens automatically during offboarding. You should also make sure to transfer ownership of any files the employee stored in cloud drives (like OneDrive or Google Drive) to their manager.
Step 3: Kill Active Sessions and MFA
Many companies now use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This means you need a password and a code from a phone to log in. MFA is great for stopping hackers, but it can make offboarding tricky.
Sometimes, apps keep users logged in for 30 days at a time. If an employee uses an app on their personal cell phone, changing their password might not kick them out right away. They might still have an “active session” running on their phone.
To fix this, you must go into your system settings and click “Revoke all active sessions.” This forces every computer, phone, and tablet to ask for a new password. Since you already changed the password in Step 1, the former employee will be blocked. You should also remove their personal phone number from your company’s MFA system so they cannot approve any future login requests.
Step 4: Wipe Company Data from Devices
Next, you need to collect the hardware. Laptops, cell phones, and tablets cost a lot of money, and they hold a lot of sensitive data.
If the employee works in your office in Rapid City, handing in a laptop is simple. But what if they work from home? Or what if they use their own personal cell phone to check company email?
The best way to handle this is by using Mobile Device Management (MDM) software. MDM lets your IT team control company data remotely.
- Company-Owned Devices: If the person has a company laptop, MDM allows your IT team to lock the screen remotely. Even if the employee refuses to mail the laptop back, they cannot open the files on it.
- Personal Devices (BYOD): If your staff uses their own phones for work (Bring Your Own Device), you cannot just erase their whole phone. MDM fixes this by putting work emails and work apps inside a secure, separate folder on their phone. When the employee quits, your IT team can remotely wipe just the work folder, leaving their personal photos and text messages alone.
Step 5: Hunt Down Shadow IT
“Shadow IT” is the term for software your employees use without telling the boss.
Maybe your marketing person signed up for Canva using a company credit card. Maybe your sales team started using a free version of Slack to chat. Because these apps are not connected to your main company network, disabling their main email account will not log them out of these extra tools.
To fix this, you have to do some digging.
- Check the employee's web browser history (before you wipe their computer) to see what websites they visited often.
- Check the company credit card statements for small, monthly software charges.
- Ask the employee during their exit interview to list every app they used to do their job.
Once you find these extra apps, log in, change the billing details if appropriate, and remove the employee’s access.
Why Compliance Makes Offboarding Even More Serious
If you run a standard retail shop or a local service business, a data breach is bad. But if you work in healthcare or finance, a data breach can ruin your company.
KT Connections provides IT support for highly regulated groups, like Black Hills Community Bank and the Black Hills Regional Eye Institute. These types of organizations face strict rules from the government.
Financial institutions must follow rules like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which requires banks to keep customer financial data private. Healthcare facilities must follow HIPAA laws. If a hospital or a bank forgets to shut off an ex-employee’s access, and that person looks at patient records or bank accounts, the business can face massive government fines.
Even if you do not run a bank or a clinic, the lesson is clear: treating data security seriously protects your reputation. Your clients trust you to keep their information safe. A clean, strict offboarding process proves that you take that trust seriously.
Why Compliance Makes Offboarding Even More Serious
Doing all of this by hand takes hours. If you try to guess your way through an offboarding checklist, you will likely miss a hidden app, forget to revoke an active session, or accidentally delete important company emails.
Business owners should focus on running their business, not clicking through software settings trying to lock out an old worker.
This is where KT Connections comes in. As a Certified Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, we manage the heavy lifting of IT management for businesses across South Dakota and Wyoming. We set up your networks so that onboarding and offboarding are fast, secure, and complete.
When it is time for an employee to leave, our team takes care of the technical checklist. We lock the accounts, secure the emails, wipe the devices remotely, and ensure your business data never walks out the front door.
If you are not sure if your current IT setup is secure, do not wait for a data breach to find out. Contact KT Connections today to learn how our Managed IT services can protect your business from the inside out.