The Right IAM Solution Can Save Your Organization Money

Written November 29, 2022

How IAM saves money

Putting in place an identity & access management system (IAM) can have a significant influence on your organization's bottom line as it is an essential part of the security strategy that your company undertakes. Even though the initial IAM implementation requires time spent on assessments, audits, purchasing a solution, and reworking security policies and procedures; the ROI and operational benefits of a modern IAM solution are worth the effort. While there is an initial investment and reoccurring cost associated with modernizing your IAM solution, there are numerous ways in which an IAM solution will save your organization time and money, in addition to strengthening your security posture.


Right Solution Vs. Wrong Solution

According to the findings of a study that was carried out by Openwave, organizations lost a total of 12 hours annually per user solely due to the loss of user credentials. This does not include other types of situations, such as a threat from an insider or compromised credentials. A company runs the danger of incurring regulatory fines and losing countless hours of labor and manpower when they choose a legacy or homegrown solution that cannot keep pace with digital needs of businesses.

By putting in place the leading/modern IAM solution, companies may cut their exposure to risk while freeing time that their IT staff often spends "firefighting" access problems. Because of this, they are now able to direct their attention to enhancing operations and expanding the organization, with the goal of reducing costs while simultaneously increasing productivity and quality of service.


Ways the right IAM solution can help save money

1. Automation: With identity being the cornerstone of security, implementing a robust, automated IAM solution is a highly effective method for keeping your organization’s information secure. It is also an effective tool to increase productivity and reduce costs. When new employees onboard, they must be given a login and password, as well as access to all applications and corporate data. Manual provisioning can take an IT worker days to fulfill as they are frequently tasked with other manual jobs with individual processes. With a modern IAM solution, a new employee can be on-boarded, with birthright access and provisioned in a matter of minutes removing the need to wait for an IT staff to do it manually. As new employees are employed, automated provisioning can save several hours of effort. In addition, manual tasks such as changing an employee's role along with modifying their permission to updating usernames and email addresses can be automatically provisioned, saving your staff time and your organization money.

Employees may need to access other services and applications after they onboard, which can also be accomplished via automated access provisioning, with minimum manual IT involvement. When an employee leaves the organization, the same is true for deprovisioning. This is not only a significant security advantage, but it also reduces the danger of a former employee accessing company data and triggering an expensive breach or compliance violation.

2. Improved Security Posture: IAM is an important security function for privileged access management in organizations of all sizes. IAM technologies can help protect an organization's most valuable assets and reduce the risk of data breaches by managing access to corporate systems and data. With IAM, users only need one set of credentials to get into all the apps they need to perform their job. This makes it less likely that passwords will be lost or stolen and makes it easier for users to follow policies about strong passwords. Single sign-on also cuts down on the number of calls to the Help Desk to reset credentials.

Multifactor authentication (MFA) is another security feature available with most modern IAM solutions. Once enabled, it greatly improves the security posture of your organizations and allows for secure self-password resets which saves the internal IT staff countless hours in redundant task. Even if an attacker gets a hold of a user's credentials, two-factor authentication leveraging for example biometrics, such as face ID or fingerprint identification makes it harder for them to get into systems and data. These passwordless mechanism not only improve the security of your organization but can also improve the employees experience when interacting with the system.

Lastly, IAM solutions can give organizations visibility into who has secure access to their systems and data as well as what they are doing with that access. This visibility helps a company find potential threats and take steps to stop them even before they are materialized. IAM solutions also keep a full audit trail of what each user does, which can be helpful for regular reporting or auditing needs and in the case of a security incident.

3. Meet Regulatory Compliance: Complying with sophisticated compliance reporting and audit standards can take a significant amount of manual work effort to compile together. Companies use IAM technology to safeguard data security and privacy, however these platforms can also assist businesses in avoiding fines and penalties for late or incomplete reporting. IAM technologies are intended to make satisfying regulatory compliance requirements easier by implementing policies and automating processes that limit and track access to sensitive data across the whole IT infrastructure.

Many regulatory compliance authorities need extensive paperwork outlining policies and methods for user verification practices, access management rules, audit schedules, and other topics. Once policies are developed, automation can assist you in limiting manual tasks and successfully adhering to the policies you've established. For example, for compliance concerns, you may automate the monitoring and tracking of every single transaction with sensitive data. These practices provide thorough reporting that demonstrates policy enforcement and aids in the completion of reporting responsibilities on schedule.


Where you should start

How might IAM save your organization money on IT and operations? The first step is to determine where your money is currently being spent with your existing processes and systems. A thorough assessment will provide an informed recommendation of what can change to support cost savings and improve your company's overall security needs. To gain more insight schedule a risk-based assessment with us.


Want to Learn More

KeyData's flagship service is Identity and Access Management (IAM). We concentrate all our efforts on IAM. The KeyData advantage is based on our people and our knowledge. Our team is made up of a highly skilled group of engineers and consultants who specialize in Identity Governance and Administration, Privileged Access Management, Customer Identity and Access Management, and Cloud Security Posture Management. Our team has a strong track record of providing end-to-end IAM services, from requirements gathering and roadmap development to full implementation, training, and managed support. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us right away for a free initial consultation.


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