Autumn is upon us and although we’re not quite at the pumpkin carving stage, summer is definitely over and in the business sense especially. The Summer temps and interns have gone, taking with them the experience of working in your organisation, with your teams, in your workspaces and cyber spaces and hopefully not taking their system access or door entry system ability…
Of course, every organisation has churn and people move on all the time, but Summer tends to bring a lot more temporary staff and their needs will often include door entry passes or codes and login credentials. If this has been managed properly then they will have been issued with their own login credentials and not simply been allowed to use someone else’s. If it hasn’t been managed properly then you will have no idea what they have been up to as an individual during their time with you. If it has been managed properly but you haven’t closed the loop then here is a reminder. It’s time to deactivate those security passes and delete those login credentials.!
We have talked before about temporary staff but now is a good time to remind ourself about security with colleagues who may be short term employees or contractors. Very often they are not subject to the same level of vetting scrutiny that full time employees are. That being the case, there will be things about your temps you might not know and so this makes it all the more vital that unused or obsolete credentials are deleted or deactivated. In a not unrelated matter, it is also worth considering how you train temporary staff in security and Data Protection areas. Many organisations tend to skimp in this area and this is not a good idea. If your temp has access to your assets then you need to protect your organisation (and the temps reputation and career prospects) by ensuring they are fully briefed in these areas.
So if you haven’t deactivated those accounts, go and do it now…
