Automation

  • 5 min read

How IT Teams Can Automate Deprovisioning During Offboarding

Rohit Rao

17th October, 2022

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Manual deprovisioning of apps makes offboarding complex and time-consuming for IT teams. With Zluri, you can automate this process, which also prevents any data breaches and data loss incidents.

Ex-employees may still have access to data belonging to your company, such as customer data, employee data, and other data that may be stored in your CRM or HRMS. This leaves your firm vulnerable to the possibility of a data breach and might impact your company’s reputation. 

The data breaches could have been purposeful or accidental. For instance, you could not revoke access of your ex-employee to your CRM due to the lack of a proper system. Now, in such cases, they may misuse the customers' data in case they join a competitive company. 

Even though the vast majority of employees do not act intentionally in this manner, it is your responsibility as an IT administrator to stop even a single incident like this from occurring.

According to Zluri’s security threat report, 67% of executives have security concerns regarding former employees causing security breaches unintentionally. This could harm your business in a variety of ways by disclosing trade secrets to rivals. 

Current tools like SSO have their own set of issues with revoking access to SaaS apps. There lies tons of company data in these tools. If the access is not revoked properly, it may cause security and compliance breach issues. 

In a survey, we found that 37% of the companies rely on SSO for deprovisioning access to SaaS tools, and 18% do it manually. As we have discussed in this post, they are not the best tool for the task. 

That is why Zluri’s offboarding automation is a good option if you want to keep things simple for your team and avoid the above-mentioned risks.

But do you know how automated offboarding operates? How can you put it into practice? And what kinds of advantages can you anticipate once it is implemented? 

We'll address each of these questions to help you get the most out of offboarding automation.

Challenges in Offboarding Process Management

The offboarding process is critical to ensure a smooth transition when an employee leaves your organization. However, this process can be challenging to manage as multiple factors must be considered.

1. Data Breach

One of the biggest challenges you may face when offboarding an employee is ensuring that all of their company details and access have been properly revoked. This can be a time-consuming process as you’ll need to do many steps to go through all of the employee's accounts and remove their access. Such as:

• Freezing their account: When an employee leaves, disable their account. Disable all their user accounts, including third-party systems and apps.

• Disabling their email: Most employees have email on their own mobile devices, removing it immediately will prevent former employees from accessing secret information.

• Deactivating VPN access: Remote VPN access should be disabled immediately. Enabling their access and user accounts will reduce data loss.

Additionally, you will need to make sure that all the company details they had are properly deleted.

Ex-employees are suspected of being the leading source of data security breaches, because their system access was never revoked. As more business systems migrate to the cloud, it's critical that IT is involved in the offboarding process from the start.

2. Data Loss

Employees take their experience and skills with them when they leave the organization. But it is critical that any proprietary documents and records are securely returned to the company before they leave. 

Data is crucial to the organization, and backup of data during offboarding is a must. This will help a new joiner with knowledge transfer and also avoid data loss for security reasons. 

3. Incomplete Removal Of Access

Incomplete access removal of employees is an extremely widespread problem that a great number of businesses face. Ex-employees of that company can still access certain of the company's apps and details even after they have left the organization. Sometimes, the app's session is controlled by the application and not by any SSO. 

For instance, you sign into Grammarly with Google Workspace. Grammarly maintains your session for 30 days.

If you leave the firm on Day 10, your session will stay active for 20 days after removing your access from Grammarly via SSO.

Grammarly won't authenticate the SSO user again for 20 days. IT admins may think they don't have access after day 10, but they do for the next 20 days. This happens when the application specifies a 30 days session period. Apps with indefinite session lengths are always accessible.

In such cases, employees have the potential to shut down systems or leave with information that could do irrevocable harm.

4. Orphaned/Abandoned Apps

Apps with no owner. Employees sign up for apps and leaving the organization causes issues not only on the security front but can lead to spend wastage as well. These apps may keep on auto-renewing while none is using them. 

How Zluri Automates Offboarding and Revokes Employees’ Access in One Click

Zluri is a SaaS management platform that offers an automated offboarding process. The features will help you overcome the challenges and also reduce repetitive IT tasks.

Zluri uses 5 discovery methods to gain visibility in your SaaS ecosystem with 100% accuracy. This includes SSO, finance & expense management, integration through APIs, desktop agents and browser extensions. 

With Zluri, you can take a data backup, and it facilitates the smooth transfer of data.  For e.g., when terminating the user's Microsoft account, the automation workflow in Zluri can take a backup of account data and store it in AWS.

Say goodbye to your employees without wasting time on a drawn-out offboarding procedure. We safeguard your company's information by removing them from all the applications they were using before they leave.

Let’s see how it does so!

For instance, if you want to remove a departing employee from your company apps and workplaces, you can add multiple actions to successfully revoke complete access.

Since, Zluri is directly connected with SaaS apps, it is able to assist in the automation of IT processes, as well as the protection of your apps and data, to a greater degree than any other solution.

1. Managing the employee's termination from the company

You can add as many as users you want to revoke access from. You will get recommended actions to complete the deprovisioning process from all the apps. It allows you to choose your actions according to your requirements.  This makes the offboarding process easy for IT teams.

2. Improves Data Retrieval 

Zluri creates a backup of the data in employee's Google Drive before terminating those employees' licenses. This helps the data and responsibilities to be transferred to a new employee.

3. Secure App Deprovisioning

Prevent your ex-employee from using all the apps they have access to, not just your SSO or Google Workspace. This will keep your data safe from malicious attackers.

Through application programming interfaces (APIs), we integrate Zluri with apps on a much deeper level so that we may communicate with apps directly and you can perform successful deprovisioning of your ex-employees. 

We're referring to direct integrations here, and we've already connected over 750 different applications of this kind.

Zluri provides a three-step offboarding process, including retrieval, revocation, and reassignment of access privileges. It makes sure that proper offboarding occurs every time.

Here, deprovisioning is as simple as clicking a button and taking care of business. Behind the scene, there are four actions taking place that ensure proper offboarding every time:

Eliminate access to devices: To start, we remove all authentication from the various devices. Therefore, if a user is signed in on three different devices, that user will not be able to use any of those devices to access the apps.

Backup of the data: We take a backup of the data and store the data. So it helps the organization prevent any data loss and enhance knowledge transfer. Also, it ensures the security of your organization’s sensitive information.

Revoke the user’s license: Once the data backup is completed, Zluri returns t0 the app and removes the user. In this way the user will no longer be able to use the app.

Remove SSO: Lastly, we remove the SSO as well.

When it comes to deprovisioning, Zluri doesn't stop at SSO-level authorization. It also monitors the SSO system's usage. When it comes to monitoring user access to applications, for example, it looks at the degree of access each user has to those applications, their sign-in records, audit records, and access logs.

Further, Zluri will alert you on ex-employees still having access to any app or data in the organization.

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.