New survey says your business information isn’t safe if an employee leaves your company.

Security specialist Cyber-Ark has published its annual “Trust, Security and Passwords” study, which concludes that 66% of employees would take sensitive company information with them when they leave a company. This includes C-level executives and isn’t just a matter of the juniors nicking a memory stick.

And they know it would be wrong. 86% of IT personnel and a striking 93% of C-level executives understand that they have no right to use company information when they’ve left the company. You do wonder what the others are thinking.

The main targets for this sort of post-employment theft include customer databases and privileged passwords as well as merger and acquisition plans – which would also fall foul of insider trading lawa if a business is listed on a Stock Exchange.

There are ways around this. Using a cloud-based system as we were writing about earlier today (follow this link for the story) you can store all of your sensitive information remotely so employees don’t have “their” copy – then change the passwords when they leave so it’s simply no longer accessible to people who have no right to it.

Cyber-Ark itself is among the companies that specialise in managing access rights and who can see which information (there’s a link to its site on the right).

Many organisations are now finding difficulties with employees who arrive with something like a phone – which sounds innocuous enough but which, by now, can contain more gigabytes of information than a powerful (we thought) computer would ten years ago. Several high-security organisations such as the Ministry of Defence insist that employees hand their phones in before entering the premises.

Smaller companies without national security at stake would do well to look into security suites from some of the other companies highlighted on the left. These offer products that look not only at antivirus and similar precautions but which tell you when someone’s doing something on the network, so if it’s fine and legal you can let them carry on but if it’s not, you can stop them.

Guy Clapperton