Passwords have become an integral part of our daily lives, but have you ever stopped to think about the actual cost of using them as your primary means of authentication? I’m talking about in terms of both time & money. Well, here at Keytos, we certainly have! Let’s delve deeper into the hidden costs associated with conventional password-based authentication.
Consider the everyday occurrence of password reset requests within your organization. We’ve all been there - the momentary lapse of memory when you just can’t recall your password. While it might seem like a simple click of the “Forgot Password” button, the repercussions on the back end can be pricey. According to a study by Forrester, the average labor cost for help desks to reset a password is about $70. So, if you have a team of 10 employees, you could be looking at an annual expenditure of $875 just on password resets. This is calculated by assuming that an employee might require a password reset slightly more than once a year: $70 multiplied by (1.25 resets x 10 employees) equals $875. #MATH!
The costs don’t end there. Think about the cumulative time an employee spends typing in their password. It’s wild to contemplate…On average, an employee takes about 6 seconds to type a 12-character password, and if they do this about 25 times a day, that’s 6.3 hours yearly per employee (and that is without counting the time it takes receive a push notification in the phone for other MFA types)!. Wow… Now, multiply this for 10 employees, and you’re losing 63 hours a year. Yikes! Translating this into monetary terms, it’s a loss of $1,134 in productivity for an organization with just 10 employees. Imagine an enterprise business? Holy guacamole!
Now imagine managing customer account recovery…You’re talking about HUNDREDS of accounts, and waste precious time doing something as menial as resetting passwords daily. Not exactly the kind of work most engineers are eager to do, and certainly didn’t sign up for. Let’s look at the scale of this futile exercise in authentication.
Every time an employee forgets a password and triggers a reset, there are underlying costs that may not be immediately apparent. It’s not just about the inconvenience to the employee; there’s a tangible financial impact. The average help desk labor cost for each of these password resets stands at about $17 according to Gartner. Over a year, if 100 employees reset their passwords, that’s a helpdesk cost of $1,700 - a significant amount that businesses could divert to other operational areas, in fact it is estimated that over 50% of helpdesk calls are password resets, imagine how much powerful your team would be if they had 50% more time.
While passwords may seem like the simple and straightforward method for security, the hidden costs associated with their use can accumulate significantly over time. It might be time to reconsider how we approach digital security and look for more efficient, cost-effective alternatives. Make sure to check out or ROI Calculator below and see exactly how much you could be saving while simultaneously strengthening your organization’s security posture using EZCMS.
