Protecting Your Data When Employees Leave Your Company

By Julie DeLong, Paper Pig Shredding 

Employee turnover is a fact of life: the typical organization in the United States, for example, can expect that about 24 percent of its employees will leave each year. Employees who leave their employers, regardless of the reason for their departure, often take with them sensitive and confidential information, such as intellectual property or trade secrets, that belongs solely to their employer. The theft of this information, whether unintended or malicious, can damage a company in a variety of ways, including putting them at risk of a regulatory violation, forcing them to take legal action against former employees, harming their competitive position, and negatively impacting their revenue.

To mitigate the risk of employees taking information with them when they leave, employers should put in place detailed and thorough policies and procedures focused on: 

• ensuring visibility into employee practices
• document retention and destruction of physical documents
• limiting employee access to data
• requiring encryption of sensitive data
• managing devices properly
• ensuring that data is backed up and archived properly
• requiring the use of enterprise apps (since these apps and any associated offline content can be remotely wiped, even on personally managed devices)
• ensuring that IT has access to all corporate data to which it should have access (some confidential data, such as HR data, should not be available to IT in all cases)

To support these policies and procedures, organizations should evaluate and deploy various solutions. Technologies that should be considered, but not all of which need to be deployed, include content archiving, backup and recovery, file sharing and collaboration, encryption, mobile device management, employee activity monitoring, data loss prevention, logging and reporting, virtual desktops and other solutions that will minimize the possibility of employees misappropriating corporate data upon their departure. Additionally, outsourcing secure document destruction services can help to establish a reliable and consistent process for document destruction. Protecting sensitive and confidential data assets from exfiltration by departing employees is not just a matter of implementing the right policies, but instead combining good policies, best practices and the right technologies into a solution that will mitigate or eliminate the potential for improper conduct by departing employees.

Employee turnover is common, as is the practice of employees taking sensitive and confidential data with them when they leave, particularly data that they were involved in generating. This creates a significant risk for employers whose data was misappropriated, resulting in potential data breaches that can trigger regulatory actions or legal actions, as well as a variety of other consequences. Most employers are not adequately prepared to deal with the aftermath of employee data theft, and many do not take the steps necessary to mitigate these risks before they occur. However, there are several things that decision makers can do to protect their companies and minimize, if not eliminate, the threat of employee theft of sensitive and confidential information. These include creation of corporate policies focused on appropriate employee management of data, establishment of processes designed to control employee use of data, and deployment of technology solutions that will protect corporate data to the greatest extent possible.