When someone leaves the company, most businesses handle the obvious steps. Email gets disabled. The laptop comes back. Building access gets cut off. What often gets missed is everything the person signed into outside the main IT stack.
That is where zombie accounts come from. A former employee still has access to a SaaS tool, a project board, a shared drive, or a sales platform because nobody added it to the offboarding checklist. For Richmond businesses using more cloud tools every year, that is not a rare problem anymore.
Why this risk gets missed
Cloud apps do not all live under one roof. Some were set up by IT. Others were created by department managers, power users, or whoever needed to get something done quickly. If the offboarding process only covers the basics, leftover access can sit there for months.
This is one place where stronger cloud governance and tighter security controls make a real difference.
Where to look first
- Cloud storage and shared folders.
- CRM, project management, and ticketing platforms.
- AI tools, survey tools, and niche SaaS apps IT did not formally provision.
- Guest accounts, external shares, and lingering admin roles.
If a departed employee can still log in, still receive notifications, or still touch data, that is a security issue even if nothing bad has happened yet.
How to run a simple zombie SaaS audit
Start with your list of departures from the last year. Compare it against your app inventory, billing records, and identity platform. Check who is still active. Review shared links. Remove stale permissions. Then add those apps to your standard offboarding process so the same gap does not come back next month.
This also fits naturally with a more complete business continuity mindset. You do not want critical systems depending on unmanaged, undocumented access.
The bottom line
If your team has added cloud apps faster than it has tightened offboarding, there is a good chance former employees still have access somewhere. Better to find that now than after an incident.
If you want help running a zombie SaaS audit for your Richmond business, contact Hoola Managed IT or call (765) 233-2338. We help East Central Indiana businesses clean up access before it becomes a bigger problem.