25pc of ex-employees still have access to company data

According to a recent study by Beyond Identity, approximately 25% of employees can still access their past workplaces accounts and emails, granting them access to information they shouldn’t be able to see.

This clearly raises security concerns as an ex-employee can (and has in many published cases) cause great harm to an organisation, typically through the sharing of sensitive files with competitors or new workplaces. The consequences could comprise data loss (through deletion or compromising critical files), a data breach (stealing data typically to use in their new workplace), wasted budget (still paying for licenses) or confidentially.

There are a few ways you can manually minimise the data risk when an employee leaves your organisation: Develop an exit process that withdraws access privileges; Find out what software and hardware the employee still has access to; Get forwarding contact information for the employee; Monitor data access once they have left; Block email forwarding; Reassign or remove relevant licenses.

These are all time consuming however, with many organisations not having sufficient resources implement such security measures.

Fortunately Torsion can automate the entire process, revoking all access to files and folders when they leave and alerting data owners automatically if somebody accesses a piece of information that they shouldn’t have access too.

But of course when someone leaves, its never quite as simple as that. There are handover periods, secondments, covers etc. So, Torsion doesn’t just switch off access from their old role (unless instructed to). Instead, their old access is carefully decayed over time. Or if the leave is temporary, Torsion can temporarily disable someone’s access, like an ‘out of office reply’ for their access to information.

Organisations can be confident that ex-employees can no longer access company data and any external access is flagged immediately. And more importantly, it is no longer the responsibility of the IT team to manage the process, it’s done automatically with a clear audit trail for compliance.