What to do when you have a new employee on your business network?
Things to consider from the IT perspective
You’re bringing on a new sales person, you’ve got a quota for them and a process for how you want them to proceed. But have you considered your network and security?
These are the things that run through my head as an IT administrator;
- Are they a contract employee or a full employee, is there different access for each?
- Do they need network access?
- What software will they need access to?
- Are they bringing their own device and how will it be secured?
- Does company data exist on BYOD devices? How will that be secured and removed when necessary?
- Security awareness training needs to be completed
Let’s delve a little deeper;
When you hire a contract employee or a brand-new employee there are areas of your network that you may not want them to have immediate access to. Sales people especially as they generally need access to your customer base to do their job. You need to think about how to give them access to the data they need without giving them access to your entire world. This is for your company safety and security, as they may not intentionally do something wrong, like delete all the information from your best client, but not everyone is perfect.
If you consider the following points it should help you and your IT staff to configure your Salesperson onboarding with the ability to do their job and yet protect your biggest asset, your customers.
Let’s start with the basics, most businesses use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) of some sort. This will probably be the primary software your salesperson will be using. Do you want to give them full access to your CRM or do you want to limit what they can do until they get to a level where they need more access? Most of these softwares will have levels of access for users that you can increase as the need increases, with usually only a few clicks on your IT providers end.
What other areas do they need access to that you may want to limit for the beginning of their employment? Sales people may also need access to QuickBooks or some other application to do invoicing and estimates. Can that be limited to only invoicing and estimates and not accessing your bank accounts?!
How will your salesperson access the data? Do they need a user account on your network? Do they need access to the internet for cloud-based applications? How can those areas be limited to protect the rest of your network?
Salespeople generally bring their own tablet/Laptop/phone into your office environment. How will you manage the access to the data they have on those devices? Do you need some form of encryption on them that allows you to destroy company data if they are lost or stolen? And once they are no longer employed at your company, can you safely remove your company data from their device? Do those devices access your network and thus need antivirus/anti-malware and Spam filtering to prevent cyber breaches on your network?
You probably have an employee manual, but do you do training for Cyber Security? General network Security? Are your employees allowed to browse the internet freely or do you have a Computer usage policy in place? Does that policy cover sales people that may need to do broader searches for information on products and prospective clients?
All these points and there are certainly more dependent on your office environment, should be brought up with your IT provider so they can help you build out a plan for your new salesperson that considers all the risk involved with your network and data.
As always if you have any questions or concerns raised in this article that you would like to discuss further, please contact us we would be happy to help.
520.751.0888