Executive Conversations: The Business Case for Identity Resilience

To Technology and Security professionals, the crucial need for identity resilience is often obvious; so obvious that we sometimes forget that executives who are not as intimately involved with IAM solutions may not see the benefits as easily as we do.

Whether you are the user of identity security and resilience tools, or the C-suite executive charged with cybersecurity, you may find yourself needing to explain identity resilience to less-technical audiences on your executive team or board of directors. Here are some of the benefits of identity security that any executive or board member can relate to.

Reason 1: Protect Your Critical Functions.

The reality is that in most organizations, your IAM system is a vital organ. Without it, your entire operations can go down until it is manually restored. And depending on the size of your company and the complexity of the disruption, that can mean hours – or even days.

To demonstrate the vital nature of your IAM system to your executive team, start outlining the various applications that rely on it. That may include HR software, email applications, customer facing websites, CRM applications, etc. What would happen if all those systems were to become suddenly inaccessible?

Then compare your existing backup solutions to the rest of your cloud backup strategy. Do you have multiple cloud providers to support business continuity and disaster recovery? Probably. Do you have multiple IdPs or IAM tenants in place? Probably not. Could your business keep running without a sufficient backup of your IAM environment? Also, probably not.

Reason 2: Breaches Are Becoming More Common.

Study after study shows that cyber attacks – especially breaches involving identity and IAM software – are becoming more common and more devastating. Recent high-profile incidents have shown that regardless of size, any company can fall victim, and consequences can be devastating, both in terms of revenue lost and tanking customer confidence.

Lack of preparation is no longer an excuse. Consumers – and executives – expect an air-tight business continuity plan to ensure that if an attack were to hit, your systems wouldn’t go down longer than necessary. Consider identity resilience your insurance against an angry call from the CEO.  

Reason 3: Downtime Impacts Revenue and Operational Efficiencies

In the event of a breach – if your website were to go down, or if your internal system was inaccessible to employees – what is the cost per hour of downtime? How much revenue would your business lose? What would be the cost of the lost employee productivity? Chances are, if your IAM or CIAM system goes down for any amount of time, your business would feel the hurt.

So do the math. It may be tedious, but once you begin calculating the actual cost of downtime, the argument for a resilience solution becomes apparent. As you begin to paint a picture of the value of a more resilient IAM environment, the conversation with your executive team becomes a much easier sell. They might even ask you, “Can we afford to not invest in resiliency?”

Reason 4: Not all Disruptions are Malicious

Now it might be harder to admit this to your executive team, but at MightyID, we have found that a breach is only one reason companies require an identity resilience plan. The more common reason your IAM system goes down is human error. That’s right – a scripting error or accidental deletion can be just as devastating to your business, and can take hours or even days to recover from.

We all make mistakes. But an IAM mistake can be incredibly costly. While identity resilience solutions are designed to help recover from cyberattacks and bad actors, they are just as effective against rogue interns and IAM managers having a bad day.

What are other questions you wrestle with? Reach out to a MightyID representative to discuss how to have effective conversations with your executive team or board.