Why Identity Management is a Worthwhile Investment

Why is identity management a worthwhile investment for your business? Is cybersecurity really such a necessity? 

Recently, we began covering the disclosure and fallout of the T-Mobile breach, which affected over 47 million people. As part of that coverage, we shared comments from Chris Clements, VP of Solutions Architecture at Cerberus Sentinel. Among his many insights, he mentioned this: “I always imagine that the cliche phrases amounting to ‘we take security very seriously’ doesn’t have an unspoken second half ‘just not seriously enough to pay for it.’”

While we can’t speculate as to T-Mobile’s cybersecurity platform prior to the breach, Chris’ comments do highlight a recurring problem in IT; namely, IT decision-makers (or the purse-string holders) don’t recognize InfoSec as a critical investment. This leads to deficient platforms and thus more breaches. 

Pondering this problem, we decided to explore why identity management – the cornerstone of modern cybersecurity – is a worthwhile investment. 

Why Identity Management (IAM) is a Worthwhile Investment 

The Full Price of a Breach? Incalculable. 

How much does a data breach or data privacy violation cost your business, ultimately? 

The answer to this question is always “more than you anticipated.” Finding a specific number proves slightly trickier since it does depend in part on several factors; these can include your business size, your industry, the sensitivity of the data affected by the breach, your compliance mandates regarding data privacy, how long the breach progressed before detection, and more. 

According to IBM, on average a data breach can cost a business somewhere between $3.86 million to $4.24 million. The security giant also noted that this average was the highest recorded in seventeen years of tracking. 

Additionally, IBM also noted that compromised credentials – the very threat identity management works to mitigate – caused the most breaches (20 percent). Certainly, that might indicate identity management as a necessary investment. Crucially, IBM also factored in lost business as a result of a data breach (an often undiscussed factor in assessing costs). In fact, lost business costs, stemming from the distrust among customers sewn in the wake of a cyber-attack, represents the largest share of data breach costs. 

So investing in identity management can help save your business’ reputation as well as your bottom line? Sounds like a worthwhile investment to us. 

But what about the day-to-day? 

Identity Management as Workflow Efficiency Tool

Identity management doesn’t just protect against cyber-attacks; instead, it also improves the everyday workflows of your employees. First, capabilities such as role management can not just prevent access creep but clarify work processes for all involved. Second, identity management can facilitate, automate, and streamline the onboarding and offboarding process. Taken together, this helps new employees get started faster and prevents old accounts from clogging up your system. 

Further, the visibility provided by identity management helps to uncover how workflows progress and where data ends up during and after going through processes. This can help you find problem areas and potential configuration issues well before they become long-term problems. 

For more on why identity management is a worthwhile investment, check out our resources: 

• The Identity Management Buyer’s Guide
• The Privileged Access Management Buyer’s Guide
• The Identity Governance and Administration Buyer’s Guide
• The Biometric Authentication Buyer’s Guide
• The Solutions Suggestion Engine