What to do when an ex-employee starts deleting your company data.

We had an interesting customer situation to deal with recently here at Abtech Technologies.

One of our StorTrust clients had to let one of their employees go.  Nothing too unusual.

However, they didn’t escort the person off the premises, delete their login and move on.  Instead, they let her go back to her desk while they sorted out the necessary paperwork.

So, what did the now ex-employee do with that time? Did she quietly pack up her stuff and say goodbye to her colleagues?

Unfortunately not.  Instead, she logged onto her system and started to delete company data, including files and emails.  The company was in the medical space and not having these files could have compliance implications.

Luckily, someone noticed and notified their manager, who removed the ex-employee from her desk and arranged for her network access to be revoked.  

I guess that person will not be getting a reference anytime soon.

So, what could they do to recover the data?

After a bit of head scratching, someone pointed out that they had recently signed up for a StorTrust backup and DR contract with Abtech.

They called us up and asked if we could help.

StorTrust uses Quest Rapid Recovery software at its core, which has powerful recovery capabilities.  It can be used to recover complete servers but also individual files and emails.  

Our engineer logged on and reviewed the logs.  They found where the files had been deleted and recover them from a recent backup.  

The whole process took less than 10 minutes.  All the data and emails were recovered to their original location.  

The first thing to learn from this is that, when you let go an employee, they can sometimes do irrational things.  So, have everything prepared, including instructions to cancel their network login, before you have that “we are having to let you go” conversation.

What this also shows is the value of having the right backup and data recovery solution in place. StorTrust and Rapid Recovery provide the protection against this and many other scenarios.  These include ransomware attacks and hardware failures as well as the more obvious natural disasters.

If you want to know more, please give us a call or download our ebooks on Disaster Planning and How to Deal with a Ransomware Attack.