A brand new year is upon us with all the fresh starts and resolutions that come with it. It’s also a great time to remind you how important it is to let your TAG support team know when one of your employees leaves your organization. Making sure you handle this simple network housekeeping task will increase your network security, save you money, and help you better manage your data.
Here’s how…
Increase Your Network Security
We’ll Change Their Passwords Right Away
It’s important to eliminate further access to your systems by a departed employee by changing user passwords immediately. This is especially important for email, and if any users access your network remotely.
If an employee leaves and their password isn’t changed right away, they may still be able to read their email through their mobile device or Online Web Access. In some cases, users might still have VPN or remote desktop access. It’s important, from a security standpoint, to remove those permissions and change passwords to lock users out.
Even in the case of an amicable departure, it is best practice to lock former employees out of your system. If anything happens on your network, they will be absolved of responsibility, as they did not have access.
We’ll Help You Avoid the Vulnerability of Dormant Accounts
The user account of any departed employee should be disabled so that it can’t be used as an entry point into your network. If accounts do not get disabled, you will end up with multiple dormant accounts that create an easy target for hackers.
Once a hacker cracks a departed user’s password, they will be able to enter your network. If the account is not in use, it may take quite a while before you realize a hacker has entered the account.
In a nutshell, keeping multiple dormant user accounts makes it a lot easier for a cybercriminal to find a foothold to enter your network and wreak havoc. Don’t make it easy for hackers to infiltrate your system. Let us know when someone leaves your organization and we’ll take care of removing their access to protect your security.
Save Money
When TAG is made aware of a departed user, we’re able to re-allocate software licenses and resources to others in your organization. The two best examples are licenses for Office365 and Adobe Cloud products. If we don’t know a user has left, you’ll continue to pay for licenses that are not being used. That’s because we assume that any licenses that are purchased are still in use, until we are told otherwise.
To make matters worse, we won’t know that a departed user’s license is available for a new employee, so when a new user starts, we will request and purchase a new license. On the other hand, when we know that someone has left your organization, we can re-allocate that license to the next person you hire, saving you from new license fees.
By letting TAG know about user departures, you ensure that you aren’t paying for unused licenses, or purchasing new licenses that you don’t need.
Better Data Management
When someone leaves, it’s often important to access their files to transfer important documents or avoid missing critical communications from clients or vendors.
TAG can help you access the departed user’s files and emails. We can even give you full access to their mailbox (per your request) so you see their full email history. This allows you to easily access any important communications, so nothing is missed or lost.
If the departed employee was working on an important project that was not being saved on your server in an easily accessible location, we can help you access their computer to locate the file, then transfer important documents to a better location. We can also copy their account profile so you can easily search it in the future.
We’ll also setup email forwarding and help you create an autoresponder to divert emails to another email address.
What You Should Do Now
Now that you understand how important it is to let TAG know when an employee leaves your organization, we hope you’ll add an item to your employee discharge checklist that includes a call to our support team.
In the meantime, if you know or suspect that we haven’t been made aware of a user’s departure, please send us a list. We’ll let you know whose email, user accounts or remote access is still enabled, so we can retire those accounts and keep cybercriminals out of your network.
