Warning: 1/3 Ex-Employees Retain Access to Vital Files

If you're a CEO, consider the following scenario for a moment. You make the always painful decision to terminate an employee, deciding that it’s best that this individual and your organization go their separate ways.

You also happen to be one of the huge number of companies that uses services like Dropbox for file sharing purposes.

You do a basic investigation and determine that most of the files that the employee copied over to his Dropbox folder to work remotely were harmless.

Then, you or a member of your team suddenly remember that he had access to critical files and huge volumes of data that could "help him" at his new job. Contract information, contact lists, document templates and more - all of that data is now out there in the ether for anyone to use to their advantage.

This is exactly the type of scenario that CEOs are fighting in the digital age, as an estimated one third of all ex-employees have access to these types of critical files on a regular basis. This shocking information comes from a report that was compiled after surveying over 2,000 workers in both the United States and the United Kingdom. This number will only get higher and higher as time goes on.

Ex-Employees and Security Breaches

When discussing network and data security, many people are under the incorrect assumption that they need to exclusively pay attention to external threats. Competitors, hackers and other types of people who may wish to do you harm. The simple fact of the matter is that an ex-employee is much more likely to be the culprit behind a data breach because they don't have to work very hard to obtain this information - they likely already had access to it as a part of their daily job.

Addressing These Challenges

If ex-employees are your most immediate concern when it comes to network security, the good news is that they also happen to be the easiest to tackle. It begins by putting a firm policy in place regarding how, where and why file sharing services can be used. Solutions like FTP are a great way to both embrace file sharing and lock down permissions in one fell swoop - employees won't have access to even a single kilobyte of data that they don't need to do their jobs.

You'll also need to put a firm policy in place regarding what happens when an employee is terminated or leaves the company. Passwords will need to be changed, for example, and accounts will need to be deactivated. Doing so will help keep your business (and its data) safe in a digital world.