Industry Insights
Employees Leave—But Don’t Let Your Data Go with Them
Reported by info.archive360.com
By Bob Spurzem, Director Field Marketing, Archive360 Inc., www.archive360.com
It’s virtually impossible to avoid employee turnover. According to a study by Payscale.com , a typical U.S. Fortune 500 company might expect to lose nearly one-quarter of its employees annually, with some organizations experiencing even higher levels of turnover and attrition.
While we often associate employees leaving a company with HR retention issues and management challenges related to hiring and retraining, there is another hidden risk of turnover that often goes unnoticed until it’s too late. That is the IT risk of departing employees absconding with confidential corporate data, whether trade secrets, intellectual property (IP – everything from customer lists to product roadmaps to code, and so on), or other sensitive information that belongs to the employer.
Invisible Threats
This type of data theft by everyday employees is more common than you might think, whether the employee has quit or been laid off or fired. A recent Biscom survey found that the vast majority of employees—87 percent—take company data with them that they created during their tenure, and nearly 30 percent steal information created by colleagues. Among those who admit to filching data, close to 90 percent swiped strategy documents and/or corporate presentations.
That’s a lot of valuable data potentially walking out your door. And such losses can be more than just a nuisance. When soon-to-be-former employees expropriate sensitive data on their way out the door, it can put your company at risk for regulatory or compliance violations, and could hurt your competitive position or negatively affect company revenue.
A new report from Osterman Research, “ Best Practices for Protecting Your Data When Employees Leave Your Company ,” found that employee turnover can lead to a number of other specific problems related to data protection as well. In the report—which is based on a survey of nearly 200 IT and HR decision makers in organizations both large and small—respondents listed data/knowledge loss from older employees who leave, and IT not having full control over its corporate data, as the two biggest data management problems.
The Osterman report also discovered that while some employees leave with corporate data inadvertently and others do so knowingly but don’t feel it’s wrong, another contingent of departing employees has malicious intent behind their data theft. This might occur when an employee is terminated against his or her will, if the employee has had a dispute with the company or a manager, or if the individual wants to use the information to gain a competitive advantage in their new company. While it may be less common for employees to steal data maliciously, this type of data theft can do significant damage to an organization.
Fortunately, there are guidelines that IT can follow to help secure a company’s internal data. The Osterman report details the several best practices that can protect corporate data when employees leave a company, which include the following:
Choosing the right technology solution can help support an organization’s policies and procedures. As mentioned above, some technologies to consider include:
When evaluating these strategies, remember that not all of them need to be used in tandem. To proactively address the challenge of data disappearing along with dismissed or otherwise departing employees, choose the technologies that work best for your business. By selecting appropriate solutions in conjunction with the best practices above, you can proactively address the problem of employees taking data “to go” when they go, and significantly decrease the chance of corporate data being misappropriated upon an employee’s departure.
