Nearly one-third of companies (30 per cent) still manually provision user accounts, according to a Courion Corporation survey.

This means there is a greater chance for human error and possibly a data breach, Courion asserted, or could lead to delays when de-provisioning leaving employees.

The organisation said this could result in data theft via zombie accounts, perhaps suggesting that firms need better data recovery systems in place.

Meanwhile, the research also showed that nine per cent of respondents admitted that they could never be totally sure that terminated employees no longer have access to IT systems.

On top of this, 53 per cent of IT managers said they were not aware of employee access rights to systems.

The poll also revealed that 48 per cent of companies take over one business day to alert IT departments of employee terminations.

A Ponemon Institute suvery revealed recently that 69 per cent of workers admitted to having copied confidential or sensitive corporate data onto USB devices.

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to online backup.