Why You Should Audit Your Software Permissions Quarterly

The quarterly permission ritual

Every quarter, review access for every tool. List every user account and ask: does this person still work here? Do they still need this level of access? Are there duplicate accounts for the same person? Are there shared logins that should be individual? This review takes 30 minutes per tool but prevents the incident that costs thousands to remediate. The key is making it routine: when permission auditing is a quarterly habit, it never becomes an emergency.

The offboarding gap

The most common permission failure is offboarding. When an employee leaves, HR processes the termination but IT doesn't know which accounts to deactivate. The fix is a simple offboarding checklist: for each departing employee, list every tool they access and verify that access is revoked within 24 hours of departure. This requires coordination between HR and operations — but the alternative is an ex-employee who can still download customer lists six months after leaving.

Run the free audit to see which tools in your stack have the most user accounts — and which are most likely to have orphaned permissions from former employees.