Secure and Seamless Offboarding: A Guide to Deprovisioning with Code

An employee's last day should be about fond farewells and smooth transitions, not a frantic scramble to revoke access. Yet, for many IT and HR teams, offboarding is a high-stress, manual process fraught with security risks. A missed checkbox on a deprovisioning checklist can leave a digital door wide open, exposing sensitive company data long after an employee has departed.

The truth is, manual deprovisioning is broken. It’s slow, inconsistent, and dangerously prone to human error. In a world of dozens of SaaS apps, cloud platforms, and internal services, relying on a checklist is a gamble you can't afford to take.

There is a better way. By treating your organizational directory as code, you can transform offboarding from a manual chore into a secure, automated, and instant workflow. Welcome to the future of identity management.

The Hidden Dangers of Incomplete Offboarding

When an employee leaves, their access should leave with them. Immediately. When it doesn't, you're exposed to significant threats:

• Lingering Access: Former employees may retain access to confidential data, customer lists, intellectual property, or financial records. Whether through curiosity or malicious intent, this is a major security breach waiting to happen.
• Compliance Violations: Regulations like GDPR, SOX, and SOC 2 have strict requirements for data access. Failing to properly deprovision users can lead to hefty fines and loss of certifications.
• Unnecessary Costs: Every active license is a recurring cost. Forgetting to deactivate accounts for SaaS tools, cloud services, and other platforms means you’re paying for seats that are no longer in use.
• Data Orphanage: When a user is removed, who takes ownership of their files, projects, or customer accounts? Without a clear, automated process, critical data can become orphaned and inaccessible.

The Solution: Manage Your Directory as Code

Just as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) brought version control, automation, and reliability to server management, Directory as Code is doing the same for identity and access control.

So, what does it mean?

Directory as Code means defining your entire organizational structure—users, teams, reporting lines, and group memberships—in configuration files or via an API.

Instead of clicking through countless admin UIs, you manage your organization from a single source of truth. This approach, championed by platforms like directory.do, allows you to version control your org chart, automate changes, and ensure consistency across every integrated service.

When it's time to offboard an employee, you don’t need a 20-step checklist. You make one simple change, and automation handles the rest.

Automated Deprovisioning with directory.do

With directory.do, offboarding becomes a simple, three-step agentic workflow powered by our user management API.

Step 1: The Trigger - A Single Change

The entire deprovisioning process starts with a single, simple trigger. This can be as easy as updating a user's status from active to inactive via an API call or in a version-controlled file.

For example, to offboard Alice Johnson, you'd simply update her user object:

{
  "user": {
    "id": "usr_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
    "status": "inactive"
  }
}

This single change is the only manual step required.

Step 2: The Agentic Workflow Kicks In

As soon as that change is detected, directory.do's agentic workflow springs into action. This automated agent acts as your digital HR and IT assistant, executing a pre-defined sequence of deprovisioning tasks across all connected systems.

Step 3: Comprehensive Access Revocation

The agent intelligently communicates with all your integrated identity providers and services—like Google Workspace, Azure AD, Okta, Slack, and GitHub—to perform a complete offboarding.

This includes:

• Suspending the primary user account in your IdP.
• Removing the user from all security groups and email distribution lists.
• Revoking access tokens and sessions for all federated applications.
• Transferring ownership of documents (e.g., Google Drive files) and projects (e.g., Jira tickets) to the user's manager, which is defined directly in their user profile.
• Initiating data archival or deletion procedures according to your company's retention policies.

What once took hours of manual effort and coordination between departments now happens in seconds, triggered by a single line of code.

From Risky Checklist to Flawless Automation

Let's compare the old way to the new way.

The Old Way: The Manual Checklist

1. [ ] IT: Suspend Azure AD account.
2. [ ] IT: Remove user from engineering-leads security group.
3. [ ] Manager: Reassign open Jira tickets.
4. [ ] IT: Revoke GitHub access.
5. [ ] HR: Deactivate account in HRIS.
6. [ ] Finance: Remove from payroll.
7. ...and so on, hoping nothing is missed.

The directory.do Way: A Single API Call

1. An automated script or administrator runs: PATCH /users/usr_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h {"status": "inactive"}.
2. Done. directory.do's workflow handles all the steps above and more, ensuring a clean, secure, and fully audited offboarding every single time.

Beyond Security: The Benefits of Automated Deprovisioning

Adopting a Directory as Code approach provides benefits that extend far beyond security:

• Ironclad Consistency: Every offboarding follows the exact same procedure, eliminating human error and ensuring no steps are ever skipped.
• Auditability and Compliance: Every action is logged automatically. You can prove to auditors, with pinpoint accuracy, when and how a user's access was revoked.
• Operational Efficiency: Free your IT and HR teams from tedious manual tasks. Let them focus on strategic initiatives instead of repetitive administrative work.
• Empowered Developers: Give engineering teams the power to manage team structures and permissions via the tools they already use, like Git and CI/CD pipelines.

Secure Your Exits with directory.do

Manual deprovisioning is a liability your organization can no longer afford. It's time to move on from unreliable checklists and embrace the security, speed, and consistency of automation.

By treating your organizational directory as code, directory.do transforms offboarding into a seamless, secure, and auditable process. It's not just better identity management—it's peace of mind.

Ready to revolutionize your user provisioning and deprovisioning workflows? Explore directory.do and see how a developer-first API can secure your organization today.