From the Desk of Kaleb Jacob,
Occasionally, a departing employee will ask their employer to take or buy their current work laptop or the employer offers it up as a parting gift for their service. We might be computer gear-heads at Eagle, but we do understand the value of parting on good terms and rewarding associates for contributing to the company’s success. Understanding that, if an employer wants to reward the retiring or departing employee with a computer, I’d recommend that you buy one at a big box store that they can set up themselves, or just put a check in an envelope. This is the only time you will see my endorsement of this. See our blog post Why Getting a Laptop from a Big Box Store Won’t Save You in the Long Run – Eagle Network Solutions. At best, the practice of handing over their work laptop to forever slip into the cyber-wilderness falls under the doctrine of “who touched it last.” For as long as it will be utilized, the IT person or MSP touched it last and they will get the calls until it finally dies. Then, IT will call the owner or manager and ask if they would like to have them work on it for the hourly tech rate which is not covered by an all-inclusive plan that covers their company. That’s an expensive gift.
The first thing that has to happen is the PC must be wiped, reformatted and the operating system reinstalled. Whatever programs were on the PC before will necessarily be gone. This has to occur because company data is on this computer and should not be outside of the protection of the overall network, much less in the hands of a now non-employee. The hard drive should undergo a deep wipe where the drive is written with 0’s and 1’s and do that multiple times which racks up some hours. This is why we often recommend just destroying the drive and buying a new one. The time involved wiping it, can be more than the cost of one. After a full reformat and even drive-writing in some cases, old data can be recovered using free software, so there is always a slight chance that it is not completely gone. The reason is that deleting files from a hard drive does not actually delete data. It just marks the space as free space to overwrite later.
Some people just assume that Microsoft Office comes with every computer and some even think that their previous business applications including Adobe products will just carry over. Since everything is a subscription, someone is paying that by the month or the year even if it did find it’s way back to the PC. The extra work it takes to prep a company PC for personal use takes hours, so it’s an extra charge which our complete support plans do not include. Sometimes the cost to prep one is more than it would cost to buy one at a big box store and put a bow on it.
That is only the beginning of a longer relationship with the departed employee that begins after all of what I just mentioned above. Many times, we have heard from these past employees later that something isn’t working. It could be that Office license that stopped working because it expired or the fact that it is no longer being protected by the software that we had running on it when the laptop was company owned. They could be locked out, forgot the local admin password or antivirus expired. Or worse, they are compromised and their data was exfiltrated and their assumption is that the company was still doing “some sort of” security on it. Sometimes the employer begrudgingly approves for us to work on it, but it sets the precedent for the next call while the charges are above and beyond their monthly spend. It is better to work into your Acceptable Use Policy that company-owned computers shall not be transferred to an outgoing employee under any circumstances. If you need a technology Acceptable Use Policy, open a ticket with us and we can provide templates for you.