|
E-business Security Solutions
Choosing the correct e-business security solution can help your company realise the tremendous savings in time and money that e-business can provide. But it is critical to get the right functionality in your solution that will adapt and grow with your company’s needs. This article will briefly touch on a couple of key features to illustrate the dramatic impact the right solution can have on your company. These features include:
Delegated administration
End user self-service
Delegated Administration
Delegated administration is the key to streamlining user administration in the face of rapid growth. It allows a company to delegate user management out to the lowest logical level within an internal or external organisation. For example, a company can delegate user management out to individual managers of internal departments, and those managers become responsible for creating users and assigning, creating, and modifying roles for their group. Marketing managers manage their group. Accounting managers manage their people, and so on. This concept also applies to external organisations. A company’s business partners, suppliers and customers can manage users the exact same way. Because no delegated administrator can assign any privilege that they themselves have not been assigned, security is maintained no matter how many levels are created in a hierarchy.
This feature securely offloads large portions of user management from a company’s internal IT staff, saving countless work hours and eliminating costly and potentially dangerous delays in updating user roles and profiles.
Self-Service
An e-business security solution that allows users to self-manage their accounts can offload a tremendous cost from a company’s support centre. As an example, let’s review how a simple, single self-service feature, password reset, can make a dramatic difference in a company’s bottom line.
A report filed by Renee Woo of the IT advisory firm GIGA (Password Reset Software Can Reduce Help Desk Costs, March 2001) lays out the following example:
According to The Help Desk Institute, nearly 30 percent of all support calls are password related. Each call to a support centre costs the organisation between $25 and $50 (US). And if the person who has lost the password is an employee of the company, that can cost the company an additional $7.50 in lost productivity. This is because of the time wasted by the employee as they look for the lost password and finally call the support centre to reset the password.
So now assume that the company takes 36,000 calls annually. Thirty percent, or 10,800 of those calls, would be password related. Using an estimate of a $35.00 company cost per call, the company would save $378,000 just in the first year.
And this does not take into account the many other calls eliminated from this service such as change of address, phone number and more. It is clear that the numbers add up very quickly, and empowering users to securely manage aspects of their service can have a drastic, positive effect on a company’s bottom line.
Utilise E-Business Security to Streamline Your Business
These are just a couple of small examples of how the right e-business security solution can impact your bottom line. When evaluating potential solutions, be sure to look for these and other features that can clearly justify moving your applications onto the Web.
 Top of Page
|
.
