Security and compliance gaps of ineffective employee onboarding and offboarding

There are significant gaps in the compliant management of employee resources throughout the employment lifecycle. Just 15% of employees have all the resources they require to be productive on day one, further, more than half (52%) of IT professionals know someone who still has access to a former employer’s applications and data, according to Ivanti.

When it comes to employee onboarding, 38% of IT professionals report it takes between two and four days to get a new employee everything they need to do their job, while 27% say accomplishing this goal can take more than a week.

This is concerning as 92% of respondents say that there is a clear correlation between people being onboarded productively and their overall company satisfaction.

As employees change roles in the organization, just over half (55%) of respondents are confident that unnecessary access rights have been removed to reflect their role changes.

These changes are still largely made through manual processes, with 54% doing it all manually, 37% using a combination of some automation and manual processes, and only 9% leveraging full automation.

Offboarding employees presents even greater risk. Just over one-in-four (26%) respondents said it can take more than a week to fully deprovision an employee.

When considering the most recent employee to leave their company, nearly half of IT professionals are only somewhat confident that the former employee no longer has access to the organization’s critical systems and information. Further, on the topic of the security risk of employees that aren’t properly deprovisioned, the survey found what terrified IT professionals the most was:

• The risk of the leakage of sensitive data (38%)
• The risk of a cybersecurity hack through an unmanaged account (26%)
• The risk of malicious data detection/theft (24%)

“Our findings make it very clear that organizations are still wildly lacking in compliant identity governance and administration tools and processes,” said Duane Newman, vice president, product management at Ivanti.

“Automation can play a very critical role in the effective onboarding and offboarding of employees and closer attention to employee lifecycle management will also dramatically help to avoid the critical risk of a data breach or cybersecurity hack.”