Forgotten passwords and password problems are the second most common reason workers call help desks with between 20%-50% of all calls requesting password resets. As long as employees continue to have to remember credentials, resets will continue to plague businesses – but exactly how much does a password reset cost a company?
Show Me the Money!
For millions of support staff and administrators around the world; resetting forgotten, expired or even compromised passwords is part of the territory. It comes as no surprise however that these staff find this activity tedious, time-consuming and from a business perspective extremely expensive. According to Forrester research, the average cost of a password reset is in the region of $70.
Although statistics vary depending on the organisation, the following are universal findings:
* Help desks receive 1.75 calls per-user per-month about passwords
* Password resets account for 30% of all help desk calls
Tallying up these numbers and using Forrester’s average support call cost of $25 per call:
| Employees | 50 | 100 | 150 | 250 | 400 | 650 | 1150 |
| Cost/month | $656.25 | $1,312.50 | $1,968.75 | $3,281.25 | $5,250.00 | $8,531.25 | $15,093.75 |
| Cost/year | $7,875.00 | $15,750.00 | $23,625.00 | $39,375.00 | $63,000.00 | $102,375.00 | $181,125.00 |
After calculating all of these numbers, it’s quite amazing to see how something as small and simple as a password reset can cost so much. These estimates only account for users with only one password problem. Although many users may prefer to only have one password for all systems, it’s extremely uncommon and in fact they’ll have to remember numerous passwords at any one time. As we battle to ensure users regularly change passwords and continually increase the complexity rules around password security, we only compound the problems faced by users.
Looking at the above table; a medium sized business of around 300 employees can expect to lose over $40,000 a year on password resets with a business of around 500 around losing $100,000 – ouch!
Access Manager Self-Service
Nervepoint Access Manager provides a self-service password reset solution that allows users to self-reset their own passwords securely and easily across a varied number of systems. There’s no need to create a support ticket or even rely on a help desk, just open up a web browser and Access Manager’s self-service portal can do the rest. Access Manager self-service password reset and management solution not only reduces the number of help desk calls but allows support staff, administrators and users to spend their day on more productivity tasks.
Access Manager Self-Service edition is a free solution from Nervepoint, hosted on a VM image and made to auto-detect your AD we’ve taken the pain out self-service.
