By Davin Cooke, Director of Business Development, Identity Maestro
User management has become a critical issue. As physical and cloud-based IT systems and environments become increasingly complex so has account provisioning. This is due to multiple factors such as disconnected legacy applications, stricter compliance regulations, and the ever-present risk of data breaches through compromised passwords.
Most businesses are looking for ways to improve Identity Management and reduce costs while enhancing compliance and security. There are five ways your organization will save by refreshing your user account provisioning processes. These include savings from:
- More efficient automated processes
- Requiring less user training and improved on-boarding processes
- Enhanced compliance reporting
- Reduced risk of security breaches
- Improved employee productivity
You may have realized it is time to invest in better provisioning tools and processes and find the best platform to improve your Identity Management strategy. You understand this is a crucial step towards a successful digital transition and transformation, but how do you measure the return on investment (ROI) of these investments?
Here are the five ways to measure ROI related to one of the above savings to help build your business case:
1. Efficient automated processes
Determine what costs are associated with your current user management and provisioning activities. This includes not only hard costs, but also time and resources committed to these activities.
Estimate the savings and increased efficiencies based on adopting a new automated approach. These savings can be realized through wages, time, freed resources and staff who can focus and execute on higher-value tasks, and more.
2. Training
Determine the costs associated with hiring senior technical resources and training and keeping your technical, infrastructure, help desk and service teams up to date.
Assess the cost and time savings your organization could make if your entry-level or non-technical resources were immediately and securely empowered to carry out user provisioning tasks without extensive application training thereby allowing your managers to focus on and complete higher IT priorities and projects.
3. Compliance reporting/audit
Calculate the costs associated with your current compliance reporting and audit. This will include the time and resources committed to ensure compliance requirements.
Evaluate the opportunity cost savings of implementing a user management platform that provides workflow approvals and automates activities reports and decreases the complexity and resources required to provide compliance evidence and pass audit requirements.
4. Security
Estimate the probability of security breaches and the potential related risk and financial damage. Do not forget to list expenses associated with validating the integrity of other data, securing the environment and the loss of reputation.
Assess how adopting a new user provisioning approach reduces the probability of security breaches.
According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (IRTC), there were fewer data breaches in 2018 than in 2017 (down 23), but the number of sensitive records exposed jumped 126% to over 446 million. Most importantly, breaches resulting from unauthorized access tripled (from 11% to 30%). This highlights the importance for organizations to strengthen their user provisioning systems.
5. Employee productivity
Look at the costs of lost productivity linked to untimely provisioning, access change, and deprovisioning of employees (e.g. slow or no access to files and applications required to carry out their tasks).
Calculate the employee productivity savings that would occur if they could get their applications faster configured and accessible.
How many employees are there in your organization, 50, 100, 1000? Assuming an average salary of $50,000 per employee, depending on the size of your organization, an hour a day of lost work/productivity due to slow provisioning could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a day. A large enterprise, school, or governmental agency 500 new hires a year could easily save $100,000 to $2M per year by securely delegating and automating user provisioning and change approval tasks.
Despite the historical complexity of Identity Management processes, there exist efficient, effective, and scalable IDM solutions and user provisioning tools that can be integrated affordably and simply into your environment to immediately benefit your organization. Contact eMazzanti Technologies today for a free Identity Management Assessment.
