Technical offboarding of your employees
Technical offboarding is an essential part of the offboarding process. The IT department of the company is usually responsible for this task. You can find out what to consider during IT offboarding and why you should pay special attention to this step here.
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What is technical offboarding?
Technical offboarding is a structured process to organize the departure of employees with regard to all IT aspects. Technical offboarding includes, on the one hand, the return of all hardware that was issued to the employee as part of onboarding and during their employment with the company. The return ensures that the company property remains within the company. It also reduces the risk of sensitive data being accessed after the employee leaves.
The second area of technical offboarding is access control. Employees use an average of about 30 different tools and applications for their daily work. Access rights must be removed or adjusted for all of these. This includes access rights to internal company areas such as the intranet, as well as authorizations for specialized tools and applications. The issue of access control is often underestimated. However, it is of great importance, as it ensures both IT security and compliance with regulations.
Technical offboarding - checklist for the IT department
Download: IT checklist for technical offboarding
To make it easier for you to get started, we have created a sample checklist for onboarding. The checklist contains the most important tasks for the individual phases of onboarding. You can use our checklist directly or use it as a template and add points that are relevant to you.
Below you will find the most important points that belong on your IT checklist.
1. Secure private and business data
Important: Make it clear that no business data may be deleted without the company's consent.
2. Access control
Remove permissions
Remove all permissions of the employee. This includes in particular the e-mail account as well as access to tools and applications. The first point of contact is the SSO provider or IdP (Identity Provider). In many cases, this is the single source of truth and a large proportion of access is via a Google or Microsoft account. User can be easily activated or deactivated via G-Suite or Azure Active Directory.
Tip: When creating email addresses, make sure they are as unique as possible (e.g., not [email protected]). This prevents them from being reused later and new employees from mistakenly gaining access to unintended areas.
Delete tool accounts
You should also delete the user's accounts in the respective tool. Even if access was via SSO, the tool providers do not know that the address no longer exists, and consequently, data remains with third-party providers.
The tool may be paid for per user. By removing all unused accounts, unnecessary costs can be avoided.
Adjust shared access
Even though it's not a good practice, sometimes multiple employees share one account. Adjust the permissions in such cases and remove the user in question.
Prevent remote access
Especially in times of remote work, employees often have access to company data via VPN connections or remote access. Make sure that all these accesses are also revoked to protect your data from unauthorized access.
3. Set up forwarding or an out-of-office message
As part of the offboarding concept, it should be defined for how long email addresses should remain accessible to external parties after the employee has left. A period of between 1-3 months is normally recommended.
4. Return of the hardware
With the shift towards hybrid working, employees are usually equipped with various mobile devices such as laptops or smartphones. In addition, they usually have other hardware such as computer accessories, office keys and the like. If someone leaves the company, these must of course be returned in full.
The basis for a straightforward return process is a handover protocol. This is already created during onboarding. All handed-over devices and work equipment are noted in the handover protocol. Together with an up-to-date inventory overview, it is easy to see which technology needs to be returned as part of the offboarding process.
5. Clean devices
6. Terminate contracts
Last but not least, laptop, tablet or smartphone use often includes mobile phone contracts. Make sure that these are terminated when you leave. Alternatively, the contract can be transferred to other employees for further use, thus saving costs.
With lendisOS, you can easily equip employees for remote work. If an employee leaves your company, Lendis takes care of collecting all devices and cleaning them in accordance with data protection regulations.
As you can see, IT offboarding involves numerous tasks. Use our checklist to think through the process in your company in detail in advance and clarify which additional tasks need to be completed. This will ensure that employees are fully offboarded.