Identity Management is Like Watching Paint Dry

This from a Dark Reading article titled Identity Management: Low On Excitement, High On Payback.

On the humorous side, twenty one percent of respondents in an Imanami research report found managing Active Directory to be more boring than filling out expense reports. (It's great that they even included that option in the survey - it could be fodder for OfficeSpace 2?)

On the serious side (from the research):

5.8 person-hours per 1,000 users is spent during a typical week on updating or otherwise managing groups in Active Directory.

81% of respondent organizations manage groups manually, while 55% use scripts and 34% use some sort of automated solution.

And back to the article:

"User provisioning and multifactor authentication are two projects you should keep if you are thinking about cutting back," said Forrester Research's Andras Cser about identity management today. "These are areas where there's a real opportunity to increase efficiency and cost savings."

42% of organizations report that someone has accessed information from Active Directory that they were not authorized to access.

This issue becomes even more acute during difficult financial times, when employees may become disgruntled following layoffs or pay disputes, experts noted. During such times, the ability to quickly provision and deprovision employees may play an important role in the enterprise's overall security, they said.

I've talked about the motivations behind Identity Management projects before, but I wasn't accounting for the current economic climate. There's definitely an argument to be made that the pendulum is swinging back toward cost savings as the prime mover of Identity projects.