The laptop is still at his place
The accounts were revoked, but the laptop is still at a former colleague's home.
(Illustrative scenario, not a real incident)
Xiao Kai was a photo retoucherat a thirty-person bridal photography studio,and worked from home most of the time.
On his last day,IT followed the checklistand disabled his cloud accounts one by one.The process was thorough.
As for the laptop,HR assumed IT would handle it,and IT assumed HR had already arranged it.
A month later, at the asset count,the laptop still hadn't come back,and Xiao Kai could no longer be reached.
Only then did the company start to wonder:Was that computer enrolled anywhere?Could it be locked remotely?Was the drive encrypted?How many of the couples' original photos were still on it?
I used to think that once the accounts were revoked,the person was cleanly gone.Later I learnedthat accounts and computers are two separate roads.
The cloud was shut off,but the downloaded files, the synced folders,the browser sessions still signed in,all of it remained on that computer.
What each side assumes the other will dois usually what nobody does.
- Keep a device list: who has which machine, and its serial number.
- On the offboarding checklist, state who collects the devices.
- Make sure every laptop has disk encryption turned on.