A de-provisioning proverb: When a door closes, make sure you don’t leave a window open

Earlier this week I attended a local cloud developers group, and I met a gentleman who consults with companies to engage in deep dive forensic examinations of their networks. He looks for the virtual fingerprints of misdeeds, fraud, and misdoings that can be used for e-discovery in legal cases. He essentially gets down to the bits and bytes of how much information flows to certain IP addresses to ascertain whether or not proprietary data has been tampered or stolen.

He confirmed something that I long believed to be true. One of the greatest threats to an organization comes from within. Not everyone who exits a company leaves with a handshake and a gold watch. Often time there are hard feelings; that the employer wronged the former employee and that employee will exact a matter of revenge or feel justified to extract some sort of perceived compensation. This includes everything from …