How Least Privilege delivers ROI: More Insights from Gartner

How you could reduce the cost of downtime by 70%

“Organizations which have a one size fits all approach to PC lock-down will have a higher TCO than organizations that optimize their policies based on user needs” (Gartner)

Optimizing desktop and server security may seem to have little to do with your organization’s profit and loss, share price and bottom line, but going beyond anti-virus protection can have a significant impact on user productivity and total cost of ownership.

Driving Employee Productivity with Least Privilege…

Anyone who has run Windows 7 or Windows 8 as a standard user will know that these PCs naturally perform more consistently and more reliably if compared to the same system running with administrative privileges.

At first glance, this scenario should lead to a more productive workforce; it would seem to follow that there would be less down time experienced due the more reliable system provided, right? Wrong.

Consider Stella. Stella is a Standard User. She rarely has any issues with her PC but one day, she’s sent an urgent document that a client needs her to review. The only problem is that when Stella tries open the file, they’ve sent a file in the latest version of Adobe which is incompatible with the older version installed on her PC. She contacts IT but there’s no one available right now to remotely access her PC and make the latest version available; everyone is dealing with more business critical cases.

This scenario is compounded when considering mobile workers. How many of the users within your organization work remotely, in different time zones or in scenarios where they may be offline when they require support from your IT department? Where users are working outside the hours of the IT department or without a reliable internet connection, it’s likely that a ‘minor’ issue with their PC could seriously threaten productivity. As a standard user, even tasks like installing a home printer or connecting to a wireless network become problematic.

Don’t underestimate the impact that cases like these will have on the productivity of your employees. Again, Gartner stats reveal the magnitude of the situation: moving to a ‘locked and well managed’ environment, supported by effective privilege and application management, will reduce the cost of downtime within your organization by 70% when compared to a ‘moderately managed’ environment.

Undertaking a least privilege implementation project will allow your users the privileges necessary to install and run the applications they require to undertake their job role efficiently. ROI will be demonstrable through the increased time that your users spend working productively rather than awaiting assistance from IT.