Layoffs Are Rising: How to Keep Your Company's Data Safe

With layoffs rising across industries, organizations must balance protecting sensitive data with ensuring regulatory compliance. Research shows 71% of companies feel vulnerable to insider threats, with the average fraud costing $1.7 million. When employees leave, voluntarily or not, they often retain access to critical systems, customer data, trade secrets, and intellectual property, amplifying risks.

Control Risks research indicates employees typically take sensitive data within 90 days prior to departure, often justifying the theft internally. This blog covers how to systematically remove employee access during layoffs, build effective offboarding processes, and how Sequenxa’s jurisdictional compliance engine uniquely supports secure, automated offboarding amidst growing regulatory complexity.

The Rising Risks of Employee Exits

Failing to disable employee accounts termination and promptly remove employee access to systems leaves companies exposed to high risks. Former employees retaining access can copy files, email data externally, or continue accessing cloud resources for weeks or months.

Data show 30% of organizations suffered employee data theft during layoffs within one year (2024). Notable examples include an Intel breach exposing 18,000 confidential files and Palantir employees downloading data before exit, leading to multimillion-dollar losses.

Financial fallout combines direct costs, $4.88 million average breach expenses, and reputational damage, with 67% of companies facing multiple cyber incidents linked to poor offboarding controls.

"The weakest link in data security often arises at offboarding, where process meets human error."

What’s your organization’s current process for revoking access during layoffs?

Key Offboarding Best Practices 2025:

To prevent data exposure and streamline compliance during employee exits, organizations must implement structured, automated, and verifiable offboarding workflows.

Establish a Single Source of Truth

Connect your HRIS with your Identity Provider (IDP) platforms to ensure trigger for immediate access revocation procedures.

Automate Access Revocation

Upon HRIS flagging, revoke sessions, API tokens, and OAuth tokens across all applications (Slack, Salesforce, Google Workspace), combined with enforced MFA to guard against credential misuse.

Orchestrate a Predefined Deprovisioning Sequence

Automate user suspensions in directory services, token revocations, session terminations, group removals, device wipe confirmations, and SaaS license reclamations using offboarding automation tools and best offboarding automation tools 2025.

“A checklist is only as good as the discipline with which it’s followed, automation is the force-multiplier.”

Do you currently use an automated offboarding process flow chart or rely on manual steps?

Key Security Steps: Preventing Data Theft During Layoffs

A well-executed offboarding sequence, built on automation, accountability, and auditability, ensures that access is revoked swiftly and sensitive assets remain protected.

Immediate Access Revocation Procedures

Disable all accounts, VPNs, API keys, mobile sync tokens concurrently within the first 24 hours post-termination to minimize data exfiltration windows.

Secure Employee Exit Procedure

Strong device management is essential. Remotely lock and wipe corporate assets upon offboarding, confirm encryption, and disable access on personal devices via MDM and EDR solutions reinforcing principles from cyber defense essentials. This complements your offboarding access control checklist.

Close Employee Accounts After Termination

Beyond disabling credentials, systematically remove users from all systems, revoke licenses, delete voicemails, update access control lists, and rotate shared credentials, avoiding “zombie access” vulnerabilities.

“Access revocation is a moment of vulnerability that must be orchestrated like an incident response.”

How quickly can your team execute access removal after a layoff notification arrives?

FAQs

What are essential steps in an employee offboarding checklist?

Revoke employee access during layoffs, disable employee accounts termination, close employee accounts after termination, device returns, data archiving, audit logs, license deprovision.

How does automation help with offboarding software employee termination?

Automated workflows ensure immediate access revocation procedures, checklist execution, device recovery, and audits, reducing human error and preventing missed systems.

Why is identity verification software important for offboarding?

It ensures comprehensive deactivation of identities/accounts, especially in cloud and remote contexts, supporting compliance and preventing ghost accounts.

What risks arise from poor offboarding?

Risks include insider threats, data theft motivated by employees, GDPR fines, reputational damage, litigation, and forensic investigations.

How to prevent data theft during layoffs?

Immediately revoke all employee access across systems using automated offboarding tools and enforce secure exit procedures combined with continuous monitoring to detect and block unauthorized data activity.

Ready to Lock It Down?

Securing offboarding with Sequenxa’s platform combines enterprise-grade identity verification, consent management, and a powerful jurisdictional compliance engine for continuous monitoring during layoffs.

Ready to make offboarding your strongest security control? Explore Sequenxa’s compliance-driven offboarding solutions and see how effortless, automated protection can safeguard your data across every jurisdiction.