Identity | Offboarding Credential Drift

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Executive Snapshot A former employee's credentials remained active three and a half years after departure, enabling a breach that exposed 10.1 million student records. The FTC just made offboarding failures a regulatory liability.

Signal When identity lifecycle management stops at the HR system and never reaches third-party cloud databases, orphaned credentials become guaranteed breach vectors.

Strategic Implication Your identity governance program probably audits Active Directory quarterly while cloud service accounts created by departed employees persist indefinitely.

Action Audit all cloud service accounts tied to former employees who departed in 2021 or earlier today. Revoke credentials for any identity not mapped to an active HR record now. Reinforce offboarding workflows to include explicit third-party cloud provider credential termination this week.