How Much Do Passwords Cost?
For a moment, forget about the security
aspects of passwords and focus on their
costs. That’s right, their direct and
recurring costs to your organization.
Although they appear free, passwords cost
your organization a material portion of its
IT support budget. A portion that could be
more wisely utilized while increasing your
security. This silent budget killer, is
simply the time your technical support staff
devote to resetting users passwords. This
does not include the abstract costs
associated with lost productivity of the
user or security breaches, etc., but the
good old fashion labor cost of the help desk
personnel physically resetting passwords on
the system. It doesn’t matter if you provide
technical support with in-house personnel or
outsource it, if you pay for technical
support "by the call" or it is fixed price,
this cost is a major and often hidden
component of your support budget.
20%-50% of Help Desk Calls
According to the Gartner Group, between 20%
to 50% of all help desk calls are for
password resets. Forrester Research states
that the average help desk labor cost for a
single password reset is about $70.
Although statistics vary depending on
the organization, the following are
universal findings; the stronger the
enforcement of security policy for
password management, the greater the
number of calls for password resets. For
the user, a forgotten password represents
frustration; for the IT organization, its
mundane and time consuming work that is
the leading cause of high turnover in
technical support positions. Until now,
there was no was to manage this trade off
between security and technical support.
Use our calculator at the left to
determine if your organization can achieve
real and immediate cost savings with the
use of our product.
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You can
instantly get just about anyone’s humanly generated
password with widely available shareware cracking
tools.
How Strong Are Your Passwords? Security
experts cite weak passwords as one of the most
critical security threats to your infrastructure.
But just what is a strong password? Are their tools
that can help me audit and quantify my risk?
