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F E A T U R E

Employee Provisioning

August 19, 2002
By Lori MacVittie

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A Bite Out of Password Costs

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Wrong Side of the Law?
	A Bite Out of Password Costs
	Executive Summary
	Online Only: Does HIPAA Affect Me?

Password-related issues represent a call volume range of 10 percent to 30 percent for IT helpdesk support, according to Gartner. The reduction of these calls can bring big savings in personnel productivity and IT support costs. "In a nonautomated support model, password reset costs range from $51 (best case) to $147 (worst case) for the labor alone," the Gartner report says.

Personnel at one Fortune 1,000 research firm supported the Gartner report, indicating that in January, 43 percent of 3,000 calls were password-related, with more than half of that 43 percent needing password resets. In April, 29 percent of 2,000 calls were password-related. The noticeable reduction was due to a change in password policy that relaxed the password-expiration time period. Using Gartner's estimated best-case labor cost, the total spent in April for this company dealing with password-related issues was $27,948. Assuming the percentage of calls stays the same for an entire year, that's $335,376 annually. Best case. Just passwords.

Compare that cost with the price of an EUA solution that provides password self-service. The ROI on the password self-service alone makes the solution worthwhile for companies like the research firm we interviewed, without giving any consideration to the benefits of the core functionality of such a solution.

One of an EUA's core features, which can be used to determine ROI, is account management from the systems administration point of view. For every account that must be created or deleted, there is a definite labor cost. Figure out the time and cost to create just one account on one system, then multiply that by the number of systems and accounts necessary for the typical employee. Now double it, because at some point you'll need to delete that account across your enterprise. What's the total cost? Remember, that is for one employee and doesn't take into consideration a change in responsibilities during that person's tenure.

By the time you add these expenses to the password-reset costs, you're well above the price range for an EUA package. (For an example of some costs, based on our conversation with that Fortune 1,000 research organization, see the graphic, "First-Year Cost Comparison").

First-Year Cost Comparison

Click here to enlarge

Now imagine that a solution can automate these tasks and notify each administrator that the process has been completed. Although the ROI on this is likely to take longer than the password self-service aspects of an EUA, it's still starting to look good, right? And don't forget to consider that your systems administrators can be doing something else during the time they would have spent creating and deleting accounts.

If you're ready to consider employee provisioning tools, check out our RFI-based evaluation of EUA products, starting on page 43. We graded these packages on a number of criteria: interoperability with directories and applications, auditing and management tools, self-service capabilities, workflow features, and ability of the products to be fed from external systems--such as a PeopleSoft implementation delivering information on a new hire, kicking off the provisioning process or the manual granting of access to a database system.

Nearly all the products we tested met our scenario requirements, but we discovered that not all EUA solutions are created equal. Some require extensive development to integrate, while others provide almost all the necessities out of the box. One thing is clear: The ROI makes implementation of EUA solutions in large-scale environments worth the effort. The products also all ensure that our fictitious CEO won't be spending time in the pretend big house any time soon.

Technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Send your comments on this article to her at lmacvittie@nwc.com.