Ex-employees pose security threats to enterprises that fail to deny them access to applications after they leave the company.
Many ex-employees continue to have access to corporate applications and often contribute to data breaches, says a new study. Forty-eight percent of respondents in the study, ” Curse of the Ex-Employees, ” are aware of the problem. Furthermore, 20 percent of respondents believe the failure to deprovision employees has contributed to a data breach at their organization. “Companies aren’t following very basic but essential security measures around employee provisioning and deprovisioning, ” said Alfaro Hoyos, chief information security officer at identity management provider OneLogin, which commissioned the study. “This should be a cause for concern among business leaders, especially considering how many data breaches are caused by ex-employees.” The solution is to automate off-boarding and to help companies become more secure, productive and efficient, he says. Arlington Research used an online survey to interview 500 non-managers and executives who work in their company’s IT department and are decision-makers for hardware, software and cloud-based services. They have some responsibility for IT security, their company creates and deletes employee logins in-house, and they either manage log-ins or are responsible for creating them.
