Most organisations suffer from the challenge of too many user identities, resulting in too many passwords and too many user IDs to remember. The productivity, security, compliance, and help desk costs related to this explosion of identities are significant, and a robust, secure solution is required by most organisations.
Typically, it is IT operations staff or application specialists that are called on for password resets for any IT systems.
The most definable cost to organisations is the help desk expense associated with helping end-users reset forgotten passwords into the myriad systems to which each user has access.
Many organisations have multiple help desks, and application help desks are typically expensive for companies to maintain, due to the expertise required.
Most organisations can easily calculate the cost of user support. Not as easy to calculate, but potentially greater, are the invisible costs associated with the proliferation of user identities.
Many organisations also do not have automated provisioning or de-provisioning systems, so a large number of end user identities are never deleted from systems to which they had access.
Other potential costs or security concerns include the propensity for end users to use a common password across systems, write down their passwords, or use passwords that are easy to guess. With multiple systems it is also difficult to have a common and consistent organisation-wide password security policy.
The net result is that the efficiency of both automated systems and employees suffers. With a large number of systems there is an inevitable side effect – a proliferation of administrative, privileged, and super-user identities that need to be both controlled and audited.
A direct effect on business efficiency is also the small amount of lost productivity multiplied by hundreds or thousands of users who have to enter their credentials multiple times per day or need to phone a help-desk to reset their passwords.
ALM single sign-on (SSO) software from Cisco Select Partner RSconnect can be installed within 30 seconds, does not require any administrator or technical skills, and will work out of the box using your existing Cisco IPT phone’s Extension Mobility settings. ALM is also compatible with Cisco CUCM 7.x, 8.0 and 9.0.
ALM IP phone app avoids the requirement to enter a Username and PIN at your IP phone device by installing a small Windows application in the PC System Tray
ALM software is easy to use and improves the internal security policies within your company, and can also be added on top of your existing Microsoft Active Directory integration.
A fully functional evaluation version of ALM software is available for download, completely free of charge.
For more details on our Cisco IP phone apps please contact RSconnect at info@rsconnect.net
