How to Position IT Security as an Enterprise Profit Center

by Chris Preimesberger

Many large enterprises think of SSO primarily in terms of employee access to applications. While you’ll gain efficiency and improve security across your employee base, expanding your view to include customer and partner access to critical applications can drastically improve the ROI you’ll see from the solution. The right identity access management and SSO solution will give you a single view of customers combining rich behavioral insights from across business units, allowing you to deliver a customer-centric experience optimized by channel. The result: improved customer satisfaction, increased adoption and usage rates, and stronger security.

Before implementing a third-party security solution, companies previously were tasked with developing, maintaining, and enforcing their own proprietary standard. This can be a time-consuming effort for the security team and potentially introduces risk for the organization. Implementing a trusted platform and moving toward the industry standard will lower these risks and save time (and money) for your security team.

While many security solutions exist, not all of them will work seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, applications and services. Before selecting the right security offering for your company, it’s important to understand whether it will lead to costly upgrades of your existing technologies or require hefty integration fees to work with current systems.

Choosing security solutions that offer one-click simple integrations will help save time and resources for your security team. Reducing integration timeframes for any third-party platforms enables organizations to deploy a higher volume of applications with fewer resources, providing positive business benefits across the organization and increasing user satisfaction. All translate to a bigger bottom line.

The costs associated with Target’s security breach have topped $148 million, not to mention the loss of consumer trust and damage to their brand and reputation. With new breaches occurring daily, it’s critical that you protect your company before you become a victim. Breaches can mean a loss of consumer confidence and diminished brand perception for years to come, damaging your bottom line.

Mobile is no longer a developing trend. While enterprises may still recognize certain advantages of Web applications over native, both enterprise employees and consumers are voting with their fingers in favor of the native model. At least currently, the advantages that native apps typically have in UI, UX, usability, etc., have led them to become more and more popular with users. Make sure to invest in security solutions that offer a consistent experience for user authentication across Web and mobile applications, translating to a better customer and employee experience as well as a reduced workload for IT teams providing increased support for mobile.

The development of cloud apps has rendered firewalls obsolete as they prevent employees from accessing corporate networks from remote locations, directly affecting worker productivity and costing companies millions of dollars in output. Today, employees require a more flexible approach to work, and your company will be more desirable to candidates if you embrace this new normal with BYOD policies that enable, instead of stifle, the user. Implement security features to empower your workforce to work from anywhere, at any time, boosting productivity so you can boost your bottom line.

With cumbersome security products come many questions from employees on everything from initial deployment to ongoing maintenance, keeping IT teams busy. With a lightweight and modern security solution, IT teams face fewer inbound requests and can spend their time more strategically solving larger issues that face the organization. Be sure to choose security solutions that are customized for your team and can scale as you grow.

Companies spend more than $40 billion on IT security technology, but hackers cost the U.S. economy as much as $100 billion every year. The undisputed majority of these breaches are password-related, and these economics tell a clear story: Security approaches that target endpoints, networks and email are not equipped to cope with the increasingly mobile and cloud-connected world in which we live. Invest in an identity management platform now to save in the future.