Just because an employee leaves a company doesn't mean they also leave behind access to that company's IT systems.
A survey conducted by Intermedia and Osterman Research found 89 percent of ex-employees retained access to at least one application from a former employee, including Salesforce, PayPal, Google Apps, Office 365, Wordpress and others.
Additionally, 45 percent of ex-employees retained access to "confidential" or "highly confidential" data, and 49 percent of ex-employees logged into a company account after leaving the company. Sixty-eight percent of former employees store work files in their personal cloud storage, according to the survey.
Part of the reason this may be happening is 60 percent of survey respondents were not asked for their cloud logins in their exit interviews.
"Employers should do something that most of them are not doing: ask departing employees, as well as those who are staying with the organization, for the login credentials to all of the repositories that might contain corporate data," according to the report. "This might seem like an obvious thing for employers to do, but they are not doing it and should be."
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