Regardless of which industry you work in, employee turnover is real and can be challenging for organizations that do not have a proper offboarding plan. Whether an employee leaves your organization voluntarily or involuntarily, they have wangle to confidential data stored on their devices that can land your merchantry in serious trouble if exposed. Preparing for an employee’s throw-away does not only involve finding a suitable replacement, it moreover ways that their wangle to corporate devices, data and networks needs to be revoked as soon as possible. Businesses that have implemented an MDM solution once have a powerful platform that can help them streamline their employee offboarding protocol and take measures to reinforce their corporate data security. But businesses that have yet not planned a proper exit protocol for their employees squatter a real threat of corporate data breaches.
What Is the Impact of Employees Leaving the Organization With Corporate Data?
Corporate data breaches can forfeiture a business’s revenue and reputation irreversibly, no matter what caused the data breach. Studies show that 45% of employees download, save or share work-related documents surpassing leaving a job or without they have been dismissed.
Following are the potential threats of permitting your employees to leave the organization with your corporate data:
1. Loss of intellectual property
Businesses, no matter how small or big, have tonnes of confidential information such as patents, consumer lists, etc. that alimony their merchantry running. Employees leaving the organization may intently reprinting this sensitive data on their personal drives either to hand it to a tropical competitor or to set up a competing business.
2. Lawsuits and litigation
There are several federal laws virtually the world versus corporate data breaches. Customers trust businesses with their valuable information and businesses are expected to protect them at all costs. This data may include protected health information (PHI), trade secrets, vanquishment plans, etc. The inability to successfully secure confidential consumer details may lead your merchantry to a stream of lawsuits and financial penalties.
3. Loss of sensitive corporate information
Data is one of the biggest resources for a visitor since it allows organizations to track their histories, unriddle customers’ behavior, study market trends and plan their merchantry strategies. Employees leaking hair-trigger merchantry data on leaving the organization can result in a significant loss of revenue.
4. Loss of competitive advantage
Employees at key positions in sales, marketing, tech, etc. are exposed to valuable merchantry data such as product plans, valuable partnerships, etc. The leakage of this confidential information can rationalization serious competitive damage, leading to reduced consumer loyalty, canceled contracts and spilled merchantry secrets.
5. Defamed trademark name
Once your trademark is known to have suffered a corporate data breach, loss of trademark reputation is inevitable. Businesses think twice surpassing associating themselves with brands that have a history of data breaches.
Identifying the Right Approach for the Situation
To determine the weightier practices to secure your corporate data and devices when employees leave, it is important to understand the various circumstances under which they may leave your organization. Retiring, resigning and absconding are all forms of quitting an organization, but differ greatly.
Some employees may well-constructed a long elapsing of over 20 years with your organization and sooner retire voluntarily with a planned notice period. Alternatively, an employee who has worked with your organization for a short elapsing may decide to move on without serving the notice period. These are the preferred ways of throw-away for a merchantry considering they have to endangerment to visualize it, as well as plan the exit protocols and offboarding process throughout the notice period.
Some employees may decide to leave your organization voluntarily, but without notice, due to health reasons or personal emergencies. In such scenarios, businesses do not have much time to plan a proper offboarding. However, in such cases, it is essential that companies instantly revoke the employees’ wangle to all the corporate networks and demand the instant surrender of the corporate devices.
Infrequently, employees moreover have to leave their organizations involuntarily. When a visitor decides to terminate employees, they have to leave the organization within a specified elapsing of time. This, however, has a unconfined risk of employees intentionally leaking sensitive merchantry information as an act of revenge.
Preparing for When An Employee Leaves Your Organization with MDM
An employee walking out of your organization with your corporate data can be concerning. But if you have a powerful device and endpoint management solution in place, you can restrict wangle to employees and protect your corporate data plane on BYO devices or employees’ personal devices.
Here’s what MDM solutions like Scalefusion empower you to do:
1. Create data protection policies
Business data security is not a step that must be taken without an employee resigns. It must be a unvarying practice right from the time the employees join your organization. MDM solutions indulge businesses to push wide-stretching security policies such as data encryption, multi-factor authentications, data loss prevention (DLP) policies, etc. from the time of employee onboarding.
2. Restrict employee wangle to confidential data
MDM solutions indulge your company-IT admins to push relevant merchantry resources on your employees’ devices. Not all employees of the organization need wangle to every piece of corporate data that is there. This prevents employees from gaining too much exposure to visitor information which creates a large data security threat.
Scalefusion MDM offers Conditional Email Access which adds an uneaten layer of security to corporate emails and ensures that no employee can wangle corporate mailboxes unless they enroll their devices with the MDM panel and undergo by the company’s security policies.
3. Monitor employee behavior
With the growing enterprise mobility, the use of mobile devices to wangle merchantry resources has increased. It is crucial that businesses alimony monitoring the use of their sensitive corporate data by their employees. But monitoring hundreds and thousands of devices can be a tricky task. This is where MDM plays a vital role.
MDM solutions offer a comprehensive overview of their inventory, data usage, compliance violations and much more. Scalefusion MDM allows visitor IT admins to monitor device vitals, data usage, device activity, WiFi connectivity history and much increasingly to identify suspicious behaviors. Collect routine feedback from employees to unriddle their policies use employee satisfaction survey example.
4. Be ready with a replacement plan
It is rightly said that prevention is largest than cure. Organizations must unchangingly have a replacement strategy to ensure that their corporate data does not fall into the wrong hands and hiring a freelance cyber security developer is one of the most important aspects. Scalefusion MDM offers unrenowned features that help IT admins yank the reigns on their corporate data security.
- Remote device lock in specimen of device loss or theft.
- Remote data wipe to prevent unauthorized wangle to sensitive merchantry data.
- Prevent users from copying data from work apps to personal apps on BYO devices.
- Factory reset protection on Android EMM devices.
5. Reinforce BYOD security
The one thing that’s increasingly challenging than ensuring data security on corporate devices, is ensuring data security on employees’ personal devices. MDM solutions indulge businesses to alimony employees private and professional data separate on their BYO devices. This allows enterprises to push security policies on a specific work folder containing all the work data, without hampering the functionality of the user’s personal device.
The reason why this is salubrious is that plane if the employee leaves the organization, visitor IT admins are still in tenancy of the corporate data that is stored in the work folder. MDM solutions can help set up policies that prevent users from copying their work data from their work apps to their private apps on their personal devices, woodcut screenshots and USB drivers, etc. to ensure that the employees do not exfiltrate the corporate data.
Closing Lines
Having an endpoint management solution enables you to reinforce your security posture and tackle data security challenges related to employees that leave the organization. Whether your employees leave your organization with or without notice, Scalefusion MDM empowers you to regain tenancy over your data and prevent misuse or unauthorized access.