Does your access management hurt your team’s productivity? It does.

How do we know? Let’s look at the data.

Access and productivity in numbers

The average employee has 191 passwords to keep track managing all those different usernames and passwords is a huge time suck. There’s no denying it: having to constantly remember a jumble of passwords is a productivity killer. A recent study found that the average employee spends over 10 hours in their work year simply inputting passwords. Add to that the time required to reset forgotten passwords, and you’re looking at a serious drag on productivity: the estimated cost of lost productivity per organization averages $5.2 million annually.

But it’s not just the time spent managing passwords that hurts productivity—it’s also the time spent waiting for access to the systems and data your team needs to do their jobs. In fact, 66% of employees say they’ve wasted time at work waiting for someone to give them access to something. And one-third of technical employees of IT professionals say that restrictive access causes daily (31.8%) and weekly (32.3%) interruptions in their work.

These interruptions quickly snowball into missed deadlines and frustrated workers. 52% of development teams have missed deadlines due to a lack of access to the needed resources and infrastructure.

For example, imagine this common scenario: a developer needs to access a Kubernetes cluster to work on an application, but they can’t log in. Their manager, who normally provides access, is on PTO abroad with spotty reception. They have no choice but to send a request up the chain manually and hope for the best, which results in losing hours or even days on a project simply waiting for access to a resource.

If this sounds familiar, your company isn’t alone—in fact, 64% of businesses have experienced financial losses due to access management issues. Missed deadlines and extended projects often result from inefficiencies in access management.

And it’s not just the users who are affected: help desk employees spend nearly 30% of their time resetting passwords. That’s valuable time that could be spent on other tasks.

Access and security in numbers

A record number of data breaches in 2021—1,862 to be exact—cost companies an average of $4.24 million each. According to Verizon, 61% of all company data breaches and hacking incidents result from stolen or compromised passwords, and it’s not hard to see why.

When employees lack seamless access to systems, it not only affects productivity but also company security. 

Technical employees need access to do their job well, but they’re not always given that access. To do their jobs, technical teams often find creative ways around the access roadblocks by resorting to methods such as password reuse, shadow IT, sharing credentials, or keeping backdoor access. In other words, when employees can’t get the access they need to do their job, they find ways to get it themselves—even if that means going around company policy.

These workarounds might help the technical team finish their tasks and knock down some Jira tickets in their queue, but it also exposes the company to security risks. A recent study found that 8 out of 10 hacking incidents were due to shared passwords, and even more alarmingly, 53% of employees have admitted to sharing their credentials.

Passwords are proliferating across our digital world and getting stolen in record numbers every year. Consequently, it’s no mystery that over 555 million passwords are accessible on the Dark Web, leading to credential-stuffing attacks that account for a majority of data breaches in recent years.

Streamlined access is key to both productivity and security

The bottom line is this: if you want to improve productivity and security, you need to give your technical teams seamless access they need to do their job.

Now that we’ve established that access is key to productivity and security, let’s look at how you can streamline access and get your team back on track.

That’s where Apono comes in. 

Apono.io is an innovative identity and access management solution that gives your technical teams the access they need — without sacrificing security.

Apono streamlines access by automating the process of granting and revoking permissions, so you never have to worry about manually managing access again. Our technology discovers and eliminates standing privileges using contextual dynamic access automation that enforce Just-In-Time and Just-Enough Access.

Streamlining access also makes it easier to meet auditing and compliance requirements. With Apono, you can see who has access to what, when they accessed it, and from where.

With Apono, It is now possible to seamlessly and securely manage permissions and comply with regulations while providing a frictionless end-user experience. Plus, Apono integrates with popular applications like Jira, Slack, and Google Workspace, so you can manage access from one central location.

With Apono.io, you can:

• Automatically grant and revoke access for a seamless user experience
• Enforce least privilege and separation of duties for better security
• Monitor user activity and ensure compliance

And much more!

It’s simple to use and easy to set up, so you’ll be up and running in no time. Stop wasting time on access issues and start improving productivity—and security—with Apono.io today.