Employee offboarding is the formal process of managing an employee’s departure, from resignation or termination, through the complete revocation of access to the company’s systems, data, and facilities. And while HR handles administrative tasks, your IT and security team manage the technical components that directly impact your organization’s risk.
Despite its importance, most organizations treat offboarding as an afterthought. The numbers tell a sobering story:
- Insider threats account for 60% of all data breaches.
- In the US, a data breach costs companies an average of $4.9 million.
- The cost per breached record averages $164.
- The vast majority of organizations — 71% — have no formal offboarding process.
Departing employees create security vulnerabilities for your organization. They are familiar with your systems, processes, and data locations and possess legitimate credentials that your security tools recognize as authorized. Regardless of whether their intentions are malicious, accidental, or negligent, the risk to your business is substantial.
Your business invests heavily in onboarding new employees, and you should apply the same rigor to offboarding. With a structured, cross-functional offboarding process, you can safeguard your intellectual property, ensure compliance, and prevent unauthorized access to your systems.
As an IT leader, offboarding is a security control point you can manage. Unlike perimeter defenses that guard against unknown external actors, offboarding manages the controlled removal of known, previously trusted access. Get this wrong, and you create insider threat scenarios that are harder to detect and potentially more damaging than external attacks.
3 of the Most Costly Offboarding Mistakes — and How to Prevent Them
Offboarding oversights can result in significant financial losses. Data breaches resulting from incomplete offboarding can trigger regulatory fines, erode customer trust, and necessitate expensive remediation efforts. These three mistakes represent the most common IT oversights that can turn employee departures into security disasters.
Mistake #1 – Not Collecting Company Equipment Immediately
Unreturned company equipment creates a double threat for your business: direct asset loss and ongoing data exposure. The numbers are telling: Capterra found that departing employees who don’t return equipment cost organizations an average of $2,000 per person in lost assets.
But the data risk often costs far more than the hardware itself.
- Digital vaults of risk: Laptops, mobile devices, and hardware tokens contain cached credentials, stored documents, and access certificates that remain exploitable after an employee leaves.
- Persistent access tokens: Modern devices store authentication tokens, cached passwords, and locally synchronized files that persist after you deactivate remote accounts.
- Mixed data challenge: Mobile devices pose a particular challenge because they contain both corporate and personal data, making immediate collection essential for security while respecting privacy rights.
To effectively collect equipment, it is essential to maintain proactive inventory tracking throughout the employee lifecycle. Keep detailed asset registers that link specific devices to individual employees, including serial numbers, assigned software licenses, and access certificates. Remember, those asset agreements your employees sign during onboarding should clearly outline equipment return requirements and the consequences for non-compliance.
Your Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems can provide support in this area. MDM platforms let you remotely lock devices, wipe data, and track locations for lost or unreturned devices. But MDM capabilities only work if you’ve configured them correctly and maintained device compliance — something many organizations overlook until it’s too late.
To ensure no equipment slips through the cracks, create collection protocols that trigger automatically upon notification of an employee’s departure. Delaying equipment retrieval creates windows of opportunity for both malicious actions and accidental data exposure. Designate specific personnel responsible for equipment collection, and establish clear escalation procedures for when things don’t go according to plan.
Mistake #2 – Failing to Manage BYOD Deprovisioning
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies can create offboarding blind spots that are easy for IT teams to miss. When personal devices are used to access corporate systems, they introduce complex, mixed-ownership situations—forcing organizations to navigate the delicate balance between maintaining security and respecting employee privacy and legal boundaries.
The scale of this challenge is massive. More than 80% of organizations currently employ BYOD policies, with 61% allowing their extended workforce to use personal devices for work purposes. The exposure is even worse at the executive level: 97% of business executives access work accounts on personal devices, and 80% of C-suite executives send work-related texts and emails from personal devices. When these employees leave, each device becomes a potential data breach waiting to happen.
Personal devices can easily slip under your security radar because they’re invisible to standard security controls. Unlike company-owned equipment, they don’t appear in asset management systems. They bypass monitoring and control mechanisms. So when an employee departs, these devices often remain connected to corporate systems for weeks or months, simply because nobody knows they exist.
BYOD deprovisioning requires removing corporate data while preserving personal information. Container-based solutions and mobile application management (MAM) platforms offer technical mechanisms for selective data removal, but their effectiveness depends entirely on proper initial implementation and ongoing user compliance — a challenge that most organizations struggle with.
The legal and regulatory stakes couldn’t be higher. Data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA impose specific data retention and deletion requirements that may conflict with standard device wiping procedures. Inadvertently mishandle personal device access during offboarding? You can face regulatory fines in addition to security breaches.
Effective BYOD offboarding begins with device agreements that specify data handling requirements, acceptable use policies, and departure procedures. These agreements should address remote wiping capabilities, data backup restrictions, and user responsibilities for facilitating corporate data removal.
Additionally, consider using enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms that provide granular control over corporate data containers. Remote wipe capabilities should be able to distinguish between corporate and personal data, ensuring compliance with privacy requirements while achieving your security objectives.
Mistake #3 – Ignoring SaaS/App Access Revocation
Shadow IT turns employee departures into security nightmares. The average enterprise manages approximately 275 SaaS applications, and with IT controlling only about 16% of those, the remaining 84% are being managed and purchased by business units and individual employees. So when employees leave, most of their application access remains completely unknown to your offboarding process.
What does that mean? Every unknown application becomes a potential breach point. The challenge extends far beyond known applications to encompass the vast ecosystem of integrated services, third-party connectors, and API-based tools that your employees use to enhance productivity. Each application represents a potential data repository that requires your attention during the offboarding process. Miss just one, and you’ve left a door open that could remain unlocked for months or years.
SaaS visibility and account auditing are survival tools for effective offboarding. SaaS visibility platforms provide discovery capabilities for identifying employee application usage across your organization. These tools analyze authentication logs, network traffic, and expense reports to create comprehensive inventories of SaaS usage by individual employees. Without this visibility, you’re flying blind — you can’t effectively revoke access to applications you don’t know exist.
Your automated deprovisioning systems should integrate with SaaS management platforms to streamline the removal of access across multiple applications. Single Sign-On (SSO) providers offer centralized control for many applications; however, your employees often maintain direct accounts that bypass SSO systems, necessitating additional discovery and revocation processes.
The financial impact of orphaned SaaS accounts extends beyond security risks to include ongoing subscription costs for unused licenses. Your organization continues to pay for software access that provides no business value, while creating potential security vulnerabilities through abandoned accounts — a lose-lose situation.
Step-by-Step Employee Offboarding Process for IT and HR Teams
The clock starts ticking the moment an employee gives notice. From that point, you’re managing a complex operation involving HR, IT, legal, and management teams, all working toward one goal: completely removing access before it becomes a security risk.
Pre-departure phase (On notice of departure)
When your HR team receives notice of an employee’s departure, they should immediately notify the IT security teams, direct managers, and legal and compliance stakeholders. Don’t wait — start the process right away. Initial notifications should include the employee’s planned last working day, current access requirements, and any special considerations related to their role or the circumstances of their departure.
Your IT teams should perform access reviews, cataloging the departing employee’s system permissions, application usage, and equipment assignments. Cover everything: network accounts, cloud services, physical access badges, VPN connections, and elevated privileges or administrative rights. Don’t rely on memory or incomplete documentation — record everything.
Managers should start knowledge transfer planning immediately to ensure business continuity. Critical processes, client relationships, and ongoing projects require documented handoff procedures to prevent operational disruptions following the employee’s departure. Start this early — knowledge transfer always takes longer than you think.
During notice period
Start executing knowledge transfer immediately and continue throughout the notice period. Document processes, passwords for shared accounts, and client relationship details. Managers should conduct structured handoff meetings with designated successors and create reference materials for future use. Document everything, even seemingly minor details that might matter later.
Your IT teams can begin a gradual reduction in access for employees with extensive privileges. They can incrementally remove administrative rights, sensitive data access, and non-essential system permissions without disrupting legitimate work activities. By taking a phased approach, they reduce the risk of last-minute access needs while improving security.
Additionally, ramp up security monitoring for departing employees, particularly those with access to important data or systems. Unusual access patterns, large data downloads, or attempts to access restricted resources should trigger immediate investigation. It’s no coincidence that the time between notice and departure is when most insider incidents occur, particularly with disgruntled employees who may attempt to steal data before losing access.
Last working day
Immediately deactivate accounts when the employee leaves, disabling network accounts, email access, and cloud service permissions to prevent unauthorized access while preserving data for potential recovery needs. Speed matters here — don’t wait until the next business day.
Additionally, you should collect all company-owned equipment before the employee leaves the premises. Recover and inventory all devices, access badges, keys, and company-owned assets. Use MDM systems to remotely secure devices that you can’t immediately collect.
In exit interviews, ask questions about SaaS usage, shared accounts, and any work-related activities conducted on personal devices, ensuring your HR team documents these responses for IT to follow up on. People often recall additional details during exit interviews that they had forgotten to mention earlier.
Post-departure phase
After the employee departs, perform data backup and preservation in accordance with your organization’s policies and legal retention requirements. Archive email accounts, file shares, and application data before final deletion to support potential legal or business needs. Balance security with business requirements — you may need this data later.
Next, verify the complete removal of the departed employee’s permissions across your systems and applications by performing a final access audit. Use automated tools to scan for orphaned accounts, group memberships, and application licenses that require cleanup.
Finally, process the departing employee’s equipment by wiping data, updating the asset inventory, and preparing it for redeployment. Sanitize devices according to your organizational standards before assigning them to new employees. Treat every device as potentially compromised until proven otherwise.
Offboarding Best Practices for Security, Consistency, and Scale
Standardized offboarding workflows ensure consistent, secure, and auditable employee departures. Your offboarding procedures should address technical, legal, and operational requirements while remaining flexible to accommodate different departure scenarios.
Automation reduces human error and ensures consistency across your organization. Research backs this up: organizations that have automated their offboarding process report a 60% decrease in data breaches related to former employees. And 89% of IT professionals agree that automation significantly reduces the risk of human error in the offboarding process, enhancing data security.
Areas where automation delivers the biggest impact include:
- Account deactivation: Automatically trigger based on departure dates
- Equipment recovery tickets: Generate and assign to designated personnel
- Stakeholder notifications: Alert relevant teams according to predefined timelines
- Exit survey distribution: Ensure consistent data collection from departing employees
Without system integration, offboarding becomes a game of telephone between departments. Connect your HRIS platforms like Workday with ITSM tools like ServiceNow, and you’ll have seamless data flow and automatic task coordination. One departure notification triggers the entire process across all systems.
Centralized documentation prevents you from overlooking important steps during the often hectic and emotional process of employee departures. Maintain checklists, runbooks, and decision trees in accessible locations with clear ownership and regularly update based on lessons learned.
Comprehensive audit trails turn your offboarding process into a defensible, improvable system. Track every activity with timestamps, responsible parties, and completion status. These records satisfy regulatory requirements and show you exactly where your process succeeds or fails.
Offboarding works best when all teams coordinate their efforts. HR, IT, legal, and management need regular communication and clearly assigned responsibilities. Everyone should know their role and execute it every time.
Additionally, adjust your offboarding process based on the employee’s access level. Executives, administrators, and employees with access to sensitive data require stricter controls and additional verification steps upon departure.
And finally, integrate your offboarding procedures with your business continuity plan to ensure smooth transitions and minimal operational disruption. During personnel transitions, client relationships, vendor contracts, and ongoing projects can all suffer. Plan for continuity, not just security.
Practical Tools: Offboarding Checklist, Policy Template & IT Tips
The right tools and templates can make all the difference between a smooth offboarding process and chaotic scrambling. Rather than building everything from scratch, leverage proven frameworks and checklists that have already been tested in real-world scenarios.
Offboarding components you should track:
- Network account deactivation and group membership removal
- Email account processing and forwarding setup
- VPN access revocation and certificate invalidation
- Cloud service account suspension and data backup
- Application license reclamation and user removal
- Mobile device management and remote wipe execution
- Physical access badge deactivation and collection
- Equipment inventory and return verification
- Security monitoring and incident response protocols
Policy elements that prevent gaps:
- Roles and responsibilities for offboarding stakeholders
- Timeline requirements for different departure scenarios
- Equipment return procedures and consequences
- Data handling and privacy protection requirements
- Communication protocols and escalation procedures
- Documentation standards and record retention
- Exception handling and approval processes
Ready-to-use resources:
- Digital Transformation Guide: Incorporate offboarding into your broader IT modernization initiatives
- Ransomware Incident Response Planning Checklist: Apply incident response principles to security-focused offboarding procedures
- Cybersecurity Risk Assessment: Use proven frameworks for evaluating offboarding-related security risks
- Disaster Preparedness Guide: Maintain business continuity during personnel transitions
Choose systems that your team will use consistently. Remember, the best documentation system is the one that is regularly updated and easily accessible when needed. Integration with your existing HRIS and ITSM platforms reduces manual work and eliminates opportunities for human error.
How Managed IT Services Streamline Offboarding
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer specialized expertise and scalable resources that can enhance your offboarding security and efficiency. When you partner with an MSP, you gain access to processes, tools, and personnel focusing on security and compliance requirements.
Organizations using managed services report significantly improved consistency in offboarding execution, better audit trail documentation, and faster response times to security incidents during employee departures.
Your MSP should provide visibility into SaaS usage, shadow IT, and application sprawl that your internal teams often struggle to achieve. Dedicated SaaS management platforms and security tools let you quickly discover and deprovision accounts across hundreds of applications and services. They see patterns and risks that internal teams often miss.
A responsible MSP should have automated deprovisioning workflows that integrate with multiple identity providers, cloud platforms, and SaaS applications. These workflows, built on years of experience and best practices, will help you reduce manual effort while ensuring that security-related tasks are consistently executed.
One of the biggest advantages of MSPs is that they maintain detailed audit trails and compliance reports for every offboarding activity. When regulators or auditors show up, you have comprehensive documentation ready to go, all without having to piece together what happened or who did what.
MSPs also provide 24/7 monitoring during employee departures. They can immediately detect and respond to unusual access patterns or data exfiltration attempts. Your internal team can’t watch everything around the clock, but MSPs can.
For example, Xantrion’s managed offboarding services include comprehensive deprovisioning across your cloud and on-premises environments, SaaS application management with automated license reclamation, and compliance support for your regulatory requirements. We provide detailed audit trails, security monitoring, and expert guidance for complex departure scenarios.
Xantrion’s scalability can be especially valuable when your organization is experiencing rapid growth or downsizing. We can quickly adjust our resource allocation to match your changing offboarding volumes without requiring you to hire or lay off internal staff. That means you get the capacity you need when you need it, without staffing headaches.
Final Thoughts: Make Offboarding a First-Class IT Process
Treat offboarding with the same rigor as onboarding. You invest heavily in bringing employees into your organization, and your employee departures deserve the same attention. The security risks and compliance failures from poor offboarding create business damage far exceeding the cost of getting it right.
Start by auditing your current offboarding process. Most organizations have significant workflow gaps. Look for missed steps, unclear responsibilities, and security vulnerabilities. What you don’t discover during an audit, you’ll find during a breach.
Human error is inevitable, but disasters don’t have to be. Your offboarding processes should account for the reality that people make mistakes under pressure. Controls, automation, and clear documentation can prevent minor errors from escalating into major security incidents.
For the greatest impact, consider partnering with an experienced managed service provider that offers specialized expertise, advanced tools, and proven processes, which most internal teams can’t match. Taking advantage of expert-led solutions reduces organizational risk, allowing your team to focus on higher-value initiatives that drive your business forward.
