When an employee leaves your business, what policies do you have in place to disable their access? If you don’t have a standard practice in place today, we recommend implementing a policy on this topic. From time to time, we see an associate continue to use a past employee’s credentials. Here are some reasons this is a practice we don’t recommend:
User security – Utilizing someone else’s log in credentials breaks the audit trail before it starts. If John Smith is using John Doe’s account we don’t know it’s actually John Smith and not Doe who brought that virus into the network.
Application Settings – Most users don’t memorize their username on a network let alone someone else’s username. If they move to another computer that old employee’s account most likely isn’t following them. In addition, if a roaming profile or application settings are in the old employee’s user shares it won’t follow the current employee to another machine.
Files – The same as above user shares and documents will not follow if they switch machines and don’t know the old employees’ info. This makes for a confusing situation when they call into the Service Desk needing help with sign-in or a password reset.
Account Management – Eagle Network Solutions performs User Account audits from time to time. During these audits we will work with the primary contact and delete old accounts that are “no longer in use”. The primary contact may not know that John Smith is using John Does account now. Suddenly the next day John Smith cannot sign into that old account and has to call in, creating a work stoppage and possibly lost files or settings. Keeping your user list (we call it Active Directory), is important and good housekeeping.
Responsibility – The old employee is no longer there and cannot speak to the content in their profile. It then falls to the user currently using that old employees’ profile to take responsibility for the content therein. This goes with the User Security. If an infection occurs from that profile we look to the active user and no longer the past employee. Do you want to take on that responsibility?
Best practice states that when an employee leaves their account is disabled. When a new employee arrives, a new account is setup for them. There are times when users would share an account and these are pre-determined and setup to be a true shared account and documented for our team to understand and be able to support, ongoing. If you have any questions or concerns on your current user accounts please reach out to our service desk to open a ticket today.