If your organization grants the ability for admins to add external guests, your organization also needs to have a regularly-reviewed and enforced policy to remove guests after their engagement is complete.

This is especially important in the event of contentious terminations, when every minute the terminated employee remains in the system represents a liability. Communication with HR is vital IT (or whoever is responsible for creating and deleting Slack user accounts) must know exactly when to create and delete user accounts.

Add the on-boarding and off-boarding of Slack accounts to your standard employee onboarding and termination procedures.

If either is left in the workspace after their affiliation with the company has ended, the users may retain access to confidential or sensitive information. That’s the case with the proper on-boarding and off-boarding of Slack user accounts for both internal employees and external guests. In other cases, however, Slack’s security risks come from user error. Some of the risks that come along with using Slack have to do with weaknesses in its code, discussed later in this article, which businesses need to be aware of but may be unable to change.

Risk #1: The onboarding of employee and guest users However, if you’re going to use Slack for any business purpose, you need to maintain a clear understanding of the risks involved, as well as the degree to which they can be mitigated. To be clear, we’re not recommending giving up Slack - the productivity benefits associated with its use are substantial. Review them below, then take the suggested actions at the end of this article in order to stay as safe as possible.

However, there are a number of security blind spots on Slack that leave companies in a vulnerable position. The intimate nature of Slack leads most users to the assumption that their communications are confidential. And in some cases - a platform that employees share sensitive and important login details and passwords. It also functions as a digital water cooler for company gossip, a channel for the airing grievances and a mentorship platform for junior employees can interact directly with senior counterparts. For Slack’s 8M+ daily users, the chat system represents more than just a communications tool.

Slack login desktop