Protect Sensitive Data During Employee Offboarding

Employee offboarding is a routine process, but a single missed step can lead to a major data breach. While disabling the user's account is standard practice, it does nothing to revoke the access that external parties have to the files and data that employee owned. Material automates this critical cleanup process, ensuring that when an employee leaves, your sensitive data doesn't leave with them.

Problem: Disabling an account doesn't sever its connections

Your offboarding checklist is thorough: disable the user's account, reset their password, and transfer their license. But a critical risk remains. The departed employee was the owner of hundreds or thousands of files, many of which were shared with external partners, vendors, and clients. Disabling the owner's account doesn't break those sharing links.

This creates a persistent and often invisible data security problem:

• Lingering external access: Sharing links on files in Google Drive and Microsoft 365 Sharepoint owned by a disabled account remain active. This means external collaborators—and in the case of public links, anyone on the internet—can continue to access, download, and exfiltrate your corporate data for months or even years.
• Manual cleanup nightmare: Manually finding every file owned by a user, checking its sharing permissions, and revoking external access is an incredibly complex and time-consuming task. It requires deep technical knowledge, scripting, and hours of work for every single departing employee. It's a process so difficult that most organizations simply don't do it.
• Orphaned data and lost knowledge: Without a clean process, critical business documents can become "orphaned," with no clear owner. This institutional knowledge is lost in limbo, even while it remains exposed to the outside world.
• Compliance violations: This lingering, unmonitored access to corporate data can result in serious violations of compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, which mandate strict controls over the data lifecycle.

Solution: Automate your offboarding security checklist

Material integrates directly with your cloud workspace to turn this complex, manual cleanup process into a simple, automated, and reliable workflow. You can make securing a departing employee's data a standard, effective part of every offboarding.

Here’s how Material solves the problem:

• Automated discovery of shared assets: As part of an offboarding workflow, Material automatically and comprehensively identifies all files and data owned by the departing employee that are currently shared with any external party or are accessible via a public link.
• One-click remediation: Instead of a multi-step scripting nightmare, Material provides a simple, one-click workflow to instantly revoke all external and public access to the offboarded user's files. This transforms a multi-hour, error-prone task into a safe and instantaneous action.
• Intelligent ownership transfer: Ensure business continuity by avoiding orphaned data. Material can help you identify critical documents and facilitate the process of transferring ownership to the employee's manager or a designated successor.
• Consistent, auditable process: With Material, you can build a standardized, repeatable, and auditable offboarding procedure. You can confidently prove to auditors and leadership that you have a robust system in place to terminate data access and secure corporate assets when an employee's tenure ends.

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