"You go now! No trouble!" Understanding the Offboarding Process in Companies from an IT Security Perspective

Insider threats account for a significant portion of security breaches. One strategy to mitigate this threat is effective offboarding practices. However, existing standards from ISO, NIST, and BSI provide limited actionable guidance on offboarding, leaving it an underexplored aspect of IT security. In this paper, we collected offboarding advice from these standards and conducted qualitative interviews with 15 professionals directly responsible for managing or overseeing offboarding in their organizations. We identified gaps and usability issues in current practices and highlighted the need for structured, usability-focused solutions. To support organizations in addressing these challenges, we reviewed and consolidated the offboarding advice contained in multiple standards into a collection of offboarding actions, integrating them with insights from our study.