Join Thousands Who Have Benefitted from the Virtual Event of the Year - WATCH NOW It’s officially Spooky SZN (as the kids say), so I’ve got haunts on the mind. Here are some things that scare me the most:

  1. The fact that I had to Google “SZN” the first time I saw it on social media. When did I get too old to know the new lingo?
  2. The window to order Pumpkin Spice Lattes is getting smaller and smaller each day. I can practically smell the Gingerbread and Peppermint monstrosities around the corner. 
  3. The depressing reality that two weeks ago, I bought a Costco-sized bag of Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters and I’ve singlehandedly almost finished it. When will I learn to procrastinate my candy purchases???
  4. The ghosts of former employees coming back to haunt me.

Okay, okay, I know I was super relatable up until #4, but hear me out.

Imagine you have an employee left feeling disgruntled after an unexpected termination. Or perhaps you have an employee who leaves your organization to go work for a competitor. If you don’t offboard these employees quickly and accurately, you’re leaving your business vulnerable to all sorts of hocus pocus and devilish mischief.

The Risks of Improper Offboarding

Offboarding is often a task left to service desk teams, but the chilling consequences of improper offboarding have a massive impact on the security of an organization. As part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s important to highlight one of the most serious risks a company could face—a former employee who wasn’t offboarded and de-provisioned quickly and accurately.

The potential consequences of an ex-employee not being offboarded properly are truly hair-raising. As part of your offboarding process, you should consider:

  • Timely recovery of company assets such as laptops, company phones, and tablets
  • Ways to reduce the risk of private data being exposed
  • Immediately revoking user credentials and other authentication methods to stop systems from being compromised by unauthorized access

When your offboarding processes are done right, ex-employees who go trick-or-treating for old accounts, trade secrets, and confidential information will be met only by locked doors and dark porches.

Employment Trends Mean Manual Processes Must Go

Offboarding has always been part of IT processes, but you can expect it to increase. According to a 2018 survey by Deloitte, your organization’s youngest generation, Millennials, will make onboarding and offboarding a challenge for IT:

  • 43% will leave their jobs within two years
  • Only 28% plan to stay in their current role for five years
  • 62% are eyeing temporary gigs instead of full-time jobs

With the rise in short-term employees, it’s time to iron out manual offboarding processes. Such labor-intensive processes are one of the main reasons why offboarding is often done incompletely or inaccurately. Traditionally, offboarding is executed through a series of cumbersome manual processes that leave room for human error. On top of that, most organizations don’t have an easily accessible central repository of data that outlines each employee’s access rights.

You don’t need spells and wizardry to make these manual processes vanish into the night; all you need is a little automation!

How Woodforest National Bank Automated Offboarding

Woodforest National Bank, based in Texas, is a leading retail bank serving consumers and businesses from more than 750 branches across the U.S. It is also an Ivanti customer, using Ivanti® Identity Director and Ivanti Automation.

Woodforest struggled with its previous Identity and Access Management solution, finding it slow to update, hard to manage, and burdened by manual processes. After switching to Ivanti, the bank implemented automation that enabled IT to streamline operations, improve security, and build a central repository, in less than eight weeks.

The financial institution transformed its offboarding process from three to five days to 20 minutes. Before Ivanti, Woodforest used PowerShell and VB scripts, plus manual processes to terminate a user account. IT still needed to manually de-provision home docs and cancel email accounts. Automating those processes and more helped the bank become more secure, no longer fearing the spine-chilling consequences of a frightfully long offboarding process.

Stay Secure with Ivanti Automation

Using Ivanti Automation, you can immediately de-provision assets and cut off systems access, limiting the potential for human error. You can build and execute offboarding tasks according to a defined, custom process, so everything is streamlined. You can rest easy knowing that former employees won’t be haunting your nightmares.

Offboard correctly the first time and let the ghosts of former employees rest in peace.