Problems We Solve
Insecure Employee Onboarding and Offboarding
The Challenge
Bringing on a new employee or removing a departing one involves creating or disabling access to email, shared files, business applications, and sometimes physical systems like door badges or point-of-sale terminals. Without a defined process, this work happens manually and inconsistently: a new hire might wait days for access to systems they need to do their job, while a departing employee's accounts can remain active for weeks or longer after they leave. Shared passwords, generic logins, and accounts created outside any central record make it hard to know exactly who has access to what at any given time. This is especially common in businesses that have grown gradually without ever formalizing IT procedures, where account setup and removal is handled ad hoc by whoever happens to be available.
Why This Happens
This happens because onboarding and offboarding are treated as one-time administrative tasks rather than a standardized, repeatable process with a checklist and an owner. There is often no single system tracking every account a given employee has access to, particularly as a business adds more cloud applications over time, so removing someone completely requires manually recalling and checking each one. Without dedicated IT oversight, the responsibility for offboarding often falls to whoever manages HR, who may not have the technical knowledge or the access to disable every account a departing employee held.
The Risk to Your Business
An employee account that remains active after departure is a direct and avoidable security exposure, particularly if the departure was not voluntary. Former employees, or anyone who gains access to their still-active credentials, retain the ability to view or remove company data, client information, or financial records they no longer have any legitimate reason to access. Delayed onboarding, meanwhile, costs productivity as new hires sit idle waiting for the access they need. Inconsistent account management also creates compliance exposure for businesses handling regulated client data, since auditors and cyber insurers increasingly expect documented, timely offboarding as a baseline control. A single overlooked account is often all it takes for a data exposure to occur.
How Cobham Tech Solves It
Cobham Tech's managed IT services include a standardized onboarding and offboarding process, so every account tied to an employee is documented, provisioned promptly on their start date, and fully disabled the moment they depart. Because Cobham Tech maintains a central record of what access each employee has across email, applications, and shared systems, offboarding does not depend on someone remembering every account an employee touched. This process is reviewed as part of quarterly planning, keeping account management aligned with current staffing rather than left to catch up after the fact.
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