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Editors Note:  This was orginally published by Chad Perrin on blogs.techrepublic.com.

Employment transition is an often overlooked danger to company security. Make sure you have policies and procedures in place that will protect your business from security compromises when someone leaves your company.

The day a decision is made to transition an employee out of a company — whether it is the employee or the employer who makes that decision — is the wrong time to develop and apply security policy related to employment transition. Such policies should be planned and implemented long before that day comes. Being unprepared could result in security breaches, as well as resentment on the part of both former and current employees. Disgruntled employees create the very internal security problems against which you should protect your organization.

The following is a list of categories of security policy related to employment transitions. Some categories may overlap in certain areas, but each has its own, irreplaceable importance to overall policy effectiveness.

1: Access controls

Biometric data, keycards, keys, parking or gate passes, and other physical access controls should be tracked and managed carefully. Many security precautions such as firewalls, deactivated remote access accounts, and strong password policy can be circumvented at times simply by walking up to a physical computer and doing things the “hard” way. Such items should be managed as carefully as possible without disrupting the work of employees, so that the items are more easily recovered, deactivated, and/or replaced if and when the time comes. In extreme cases, locks may need to be changed and new keys reissued, but in many cases a well-managed system should allow most access control measures for a given employee to be simply deactivated with a few keypresses or mouse clicks.

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