The cost of employee turnover

Start by finding out which employees store what personal data and where. All personal data should be listed and monitored by your CISO or DPO. List all the sensitive and personal data you store and categorise it by:  

• Risk level 
• Type  
• Location 
• Access 

Departments and individuals within your company may store high risk data in a way that isolates it and conceals security vulnerabilities. You need to uncover this type of “dark data” buried in “data silos” that may otherwise fall outside your security protocols.  

Mapping all your data accurately makes it easy to develop a data privacy strategy. Once you know the categories of data your team stores, decide: 

• Where each type of data should be stored
• Who should have access to each type of data 
• How long each type of data should be retained 

Monitoring all your files will help you implement data loss prevention policies that will protect all the personally identifiable information, sensitive corporate intellectual property, and other valuable data your team stores.

Hopefully, when an employee does leave, they will give you a couple of weeks’ notice. As you make plans to fill their position and cover their responsibilities, make sure you also get an inventory of the company data they store to make sure it is protected and handed off to the departments that need it. You could assign someone to help the employee who is leaving go through the personal data they store. 

This is rather labor-intensive, and it is not easy to be sure you will find everything. Using automated data discovery is a more accurate (and much quicker!) way to make sure you find all the data that needs to be cleaned up or handed over safely to someone else. If you use automated data discovery, invite the employee who is leaving to join now.  

1. Select the local, cloud and email storage you want them to scan for sensitive data 
2. They should select and authenticate folders in those locations and start the scan
3. Their results will appear on their dashboard + your admin dashboard 

This gives you an easy overview of the company data that the employee collected while they worked for you. Files should automatically be classified by type, risk level, and location. Review the files you find. Zoom in on important data and eliminate files that are redundant, obsolete, or trivial.  

Export and share important files with another employee
Move or delete sensitive files stored in the wrong location

Give special attention to high-risk files stored on local drives, email folders and other vulnerable locations. This may be your last chance to salvage or delete them! You can export important files to share them with someone else, delete files that are no longer needed, and more.  This is a quick way to make sure your valuable data stays where it should be when an employee leaves. 

Best practices for data privacy include performing this simple data inventory process for all your employees regularly. Then, repeat it any time you know you may lose a member of your team. Make sure you find out who has what data before someone walks out the door with it. Automated data inventory makes this much easier, and will free you up to concentrate on keeping your business running smoothly during times of employee churn.