A fact of current economic life is that employee turnover is on the increase. Many retailers, for example, have turnover rates approaching 100 per cent, which means employees are coming and going at a rapid rate. But what many companies don’t realise is that when employees leave, they often take with them the firm’s most precious assets: the mission-critical data that runs the business. This could include customer account data, sales and inventory data, confidential business intelligence, and everything else stored in the company’s internal systems. Disgruntled employees can even go one step further and cause malicious damage to company systems. While departing employees routinely return things like laptops and security badges, they hold on to the security IDs and passwords that provide access to the company’s internal databases. In fact, over 20 per cent of accounts on many company systems – mail systems and mainframes, for example – are for employees who have left the organisation, often as long as five years before. Full Story