Why Should You Automate Offboarding? And How to Do It

Offboarding is a tedious and challenging process since it requires careful and thorough deprovisioning of all the IT accesses of departing employees.

The manual management of such challenging tasks is time-consuming and filled with human errors, this is where automated offboarding can be of great use.

Employee offboarding is a challenging task. Improper offboarding can be a recipe for disaster if not done properly.

An offboarding process is necessary when an employee leaves the company for reasons like resignation, termination, or retirement. The process includes transferring responsibilities, submitting devices, and, most importantly, revoking access from the existing tools.

According to the report, executives are targeting access management (31%) over the next quarter, followed by process automation(26%).

It’s easy to handle a small number of offboarding manually, but what about a large organization where employees come and go every week? Since most of the tasks are repetitive, it can lead to several mistakes. Additionally, it might take weeks for IT teams to completely revoke access. In such a case, automating the whole process can be an efficient way to perform the task.

Automating the offboarding will improve your security. This will ensure that your ex-employees cannot access your network and sensitive information. Moreover, it will help your business to be efficient and remain compliant.

By automating the process, firms can reduce the costs associated with offboarding while simultaneously protecting themselves from potential risks such as data breaches, security hacks, permanent data loss, etc.

For instance, a computer technician at a large publishing company maliciously crashed many network servers after being fired. All server data was deleted forever and couldn't be recovered. The publisher lost over $100,000 after closing its New York headquarters for two days.

Let’s discuss key reasons for automating the offboarding process:

Key Reasons for Automating Offboarding

1. To successfully recover company assets

Proper offboarding requires a record of assets to carry out the process efficiently every time. In the modern system of remote work, almost all employees utilize some aspect of the company's services and assets in some capacity. They may, for instance, be given access to the company's proprietary information as well as laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and subscriptions to cloud-based software services.

When it comes time for an employee to hand in their resignation, it is imperative that they return all the company's assets and equipment. It is the responsibility of the IT teams to ensure that all the assets have been gathered.

Despite the fact that many businesses maintain a record of their hardware and software assets, tracking and managing them has become complex.

For instance, if you are maintaining an inventory of SaaS subscriptions through a spreadsheet, it might lack in revoking access to each SaaS properly. This is because the spreadsheets are not updated regularly.

This is where automated offboarding procedures can help you. Automation tools like Zluri can be used to automate the whole process, where the departing employee’s accesses are revoked from all the assets.

2. To retain data

Data retention is extremely important for an organization. That’s why it is crucial to keep a backup of data in all subscription accounts of SaaS apps during offboarding. This helps with data loss prevention, knowledge transfer, and security.

To retain data, you first need to know what SaaS apps the ex-employee was using, as most of the data lie there.

100s of SaaS apps are now being used by employees to help them boost their productivity. So, it is close to impossible to track data from these apps if you don’t know what apps they were using.

When you terminate an employee, occasionally, you will be unable to safeguard all the data of whatever project they might be working on, and you lose access to all the project's data. It can cause a heavy loss in businesses, such as data loss and disruption in ongoing projects and services.

Automated offboarding can help you get rid of this problem. Several solutions, like Zluri, discover all the apps utilized in the organization with 100% accuracy.

3. To prevent data breaches

During the offboarding process, the crucial step is to revoke access or permissions. This gets challenging when you are unaware of the apps that former employees were using. When employees use their personal devices, it adds to the challenges.

When IT teams lack revoking permissions, former employees may continue to access and misuse the data. This might lead to potential data breaches and impact the security of the organization.

The image implies that access privileges (64%) and personal device management (61%) present the biggest offboarding security threats.

A report from OneLogin says that 32% of companies took more than a week to remove former employees from SaaS apps. Also, \"their organization's data breach was caused in part by their failure to remove employees from corporate applications.\"

Moreover, you will be required to ensure that all the corporate information the ex-employees possessed is effectively removed from their system.

Due to the fact that their system access was never terminated, disgruntled former workers are believed to be the primary source of data security breaches.

Automated offboarding helps to prevent any data breaches and any damage that could be done to the organization’s security. It can be very useful by removing the ex-employees' engagement in all the ongoing projects and securing the previous data shared within just a few clicks.

4. To save time

The traditional offboarding process takes much time and doesn’t guarantee any successful completion of the task. In today’s system of remote work, almost all employees use some aspect of the company’s services and assets in some capacity.

They may, for instance, be given access to the company's proprietary information as well as laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and subscriptions to cloud-based software services.

While offboarding an employee, one of the most significant issues you may have is ensuring that all the sensitive data and access have been appropriately canceled. This can be a procedure that consumes a lot of time since you will have to go through all of the employee accounts and delete their access individually.

When employee hands over their resignation, it is imperative that they return all of the company's assets and equipment. It is the responsibility of the IT teams to ensure that all of the assets have been gathered.

For instance, if there is a change in the data of any current licenses or whenever a new app is acquired, you are required to update the applications and licensing information. This process will take a significant amount of time.

Despite the fact that many businesses maintain a record of their physical assets and the recipients of those assets, this is not the case with software subscriptions. Even if they are maintaining an inventory of SaaS subscriptions, it is done via Google Sheets or Excel or another program such as Airtable. Managing SaaS with this approach can multiply the challenges.

How Much You Save by Automating Offboarding

The benefits and time savings you make with automating offboarding increase in tandem with the size of a business. The offboarding process requires a greater amount of time and attention from IT departments if there is a higher turnover rate among the workforce.

When the true benefits of automation begin, it saves countless hours and eliminates mistakes, and the entire offboarding process becomes considerably easier.

Also, it makes the process more streamlined for everyone involved. Automated offboarding eliminates many hazards, including having to keep former employees' passwords, dealing with legal issues, and continuing to pay expensive software license costs for those who have left the company.

Calculating ROI with Automated Offboarding

Automate Offboarding With Zluri

Offboarding involves the simultaneous completion of many activities. The process involves a number of different departments, such as Human resources and various IT teams, and it is necessary for these departments to collaborate with one another.

Automating the overall offboarding procedure can provide you a streamlined transition of responsibilities and information. Zluri is one such SaaS Management platform, that offers a proper offboarding automation tool.

With Zluri’s offboarding automation process, you not only save time and reduce the amount of effort required but also helps you prevent security breaches that are caused by employees working for the company.

Zluri helps you gain visibility to all the apps and empowers you to revoke access while offboarding. This reduces the workload of IT teams and ensures the organization's data security.

You can go through this blog for more information on how Zluri helps revoke access from SaaS apps.