How to prevent ex-employees from compromising IT security

You can’t afford a security blind spot, but let’s be honest: when an employee walks out the door, that’s exactly what your IT environment often gets. In a perfect world, account access for an ex-employee would be revoked the instant they separate from the company. The reality, however, is a frantic, error-prone, manual checklist spanning multiple systems, creating a dangerous gap where insider threats—whether malicious or accidental—can flourish. That lingering access is a primary risk vector for data breaches, unauthorized system use, and compliance failures.

The only process fast enough, reliable enough, and complete enough is to automate offboarding.

The failure of manual offboarding

Even the most well-intentioned IT admin can fail at offboarding in a timely and accurate manner. Manual offboarding processes, often managed by a multi-page checklist, introduce enormous security liabilities by relying on human execution during a high-stakes, time-sensitive event.

Human error and fatigue: Reliance on multi-step checklists inevitably leads to mistakes. A hurried IT admin might accidentally disable a critical shared service instead of the employee’s individual account, or, conversely, forget to revoke access to a specific application altogether. Furthermore, there’s a disastrous difference between disabling an account and deleting it, with improper execution leaving residual tokens or data ownership gaps.

The time lag (the vulnerable window): The average employee uses dozens of services—from core platforms like Slack and Salesforce to departmental tools like GitHub, Jira, and various HR systems. Manually revoking access to 15 or more services requires coordination between multiple teams (HR, IT, Security) and can take hours or even days to complete. This “time-to-revocation” is a massive security liability where the departing employee still holds the keys to the kingdom.

Incomplete revocation (“shadow access”): The biggest blind spot in manual offboarding is “shadow access.” These are missing credentials tied to third-party SaaS apps, departmental tools, or accounts provisioned outside of the central IT directory (Shadow IT). Because these accounts don’t appear on the main checklist, they are frequently missed, allowing the ex-employee to retain persistent, undetected access long after they’ve left the building.

Offboarding automation: The instant security trigger

Offboarding automation transforms the slow, error-prone manual process into an instantaneous security protocol.

The ideal offboarding automation workflow doesn’t start with IT, it starts with HR. When HR marks an employee as terminated in your HRIS, the offboarding workflow kicks off. This workflow executes actions across all integrated applications in seconds like disabling main directory accounts (Okta, Entra ID, etc.), removing the user from sensitive security groups, and transferring ownership of critical shared files to a manager or team account.

Additional triggers like scheduling and conditional logic can help customize the offboarding workflow to custom-fit your organization. For example, if a user is part of the ‘Finance Team’ security group, the workflow can branch to include an extra step, such as notifying the financial system administrator or revoking access to specific ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.

This automated “kill switch” saves IT significant time and ensures immediate revocation of access, mitigating the risk of data breaches from former employees.

Why automation is the #1 security measure

Offboarding automation isn’t just an improvement over manual methods; it is a foundational security control that fundamentally changes the risk equation.

Absolute speed

Automation neutralizes the most volatile period of the separation—the critical zero-hour—by mitigating the immediate risk posed by a vengeful or opportunistic ex-employee. This instant action is the fastest path to achieving security and compliance, especially with strict data protection regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

Guaranteed completeness

By programmatically linking every provisioned service, automation ensures the consistent execution of the full offboarding policy, hitting every integrated service without fail. This eliminates the risk of human oversight, guaranteeing that low-priority or obscure accounts are never forgotten.

Verifiable audit trail

Every action taken by the automated system is logged and timestamped. This creates a non-repudiable audit trail of when and how access was revoked, which is crucial evidence for forensic analysis, regulatory compliance audits, or legal defense in case of a data breach.

Efficiency for IT teams

Shifting this high-volume, high-stakes task from manual execution to automated workflows frees up security and IT personnel to focus on proactive defense and strategic security projects, rather than repetitive administrative work.

Automated offboarding with BetterCloud

Since offboarding is a significant security event, you need a SaaS management platform that can fully automate the offboarding process.

Here are a few features BetterCloud users love for their offboarding workflows.

Schedule workflows for timely execution

Today’s global and flexible work environment means that standard working hours are far more complex than a simple 9-to-5. Since an employee’s location dictates their working hours, your offboarding process must be able to start on-demand at the right local time for each individual.

Failing to time offboarding properly can be a significant business disruptor. For instance, you definitely don’t want your IT team to revoke access during an employee’s final, critical meeting as they’re transitioning and transferring vital business knowledge.

BetterCloud allows you to create automated, on-demand offboarding processes that can be triggered with a single click in platforms like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta, Entra ID, and OneLogin, or immediately when a ticket is submitted in an ITSM tool like Jira. Access revocation workflows, for example, should be scheduled to start right after an employee’s final manager meeting to prevent any interruption to their work activities.

Branching workflows

BetterCloud’s If/Else branching allows you to create a single workflow that can be tailored to specific roles. 

Simply start with a trigger of your choice, like when a new hire ticket is submitted, then add +And +Or to fine-tune the conditions needed. 

Within each condition branch, add actions across all your SaaS applications to meet those needs. Additionally, options for Else IF and Else can be used to add more functionality to your automation workflow.

Since one workflow manages the entire process, admins can update it much more easily.

Offboarding automation prioritizes security

If your offboarding still relies on a paper or digital checklist, your security perimeter has a massive, known hole. Offboarding automation is the only proactive, reliable solution.

Ask your IT and HR leaders: “How long, precisely, does it take to revoke all access for one departing employee?” If the answer is longer than five minutes, you need automation.

Ready to plug the security gaps in your offboarding process? Book a demo today to see how BetterCloud can help you achieve sub-five-minute security for every departure.