How MFA Can Save Your Company Money While Reducing Risk

Remember the days when you only had one password? As fondly as we look back on those technologically simpler times, we know now that usernames and passwords are no longer sufficient to protect accounts against unauthorized access. And while everyone knows that multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the easiest, most effective ways to help prevent unauthorized account access, it can be difficult to understand and demonstrate the return on this investment in time — and sometimes money — for some organizations. 

Arguably the most important part of your job as an admin is to safeguard the data that lives in your Salesforce instance. And while you certainly have a say in how this is done, sometimes new implementations and investments involve getting buy-in from leadership. While “selling upward” is a skill you’ve likely honed as an #AwesomeAdmin, if you’re still working to educate your leadership on the benefits of implementing MFA for Salesforce (or a single sign-on [SSO] solution paired with MFA), we have great news for you!

Salesforce recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to help our customers better understand the broad business impact and benefits of MFA. Specifically, this study examined the potential return on investment (ROI) organizations may realize by deploying MFA.¹

So, if you’re getting questions from your boss (or, gulp, your boss’s boss) about how MFA adds value to a business’s bottom line, here are some clear takeaways that will help you build your case.

Using a composite representative of the six decision-makers that Forrester interviewed, it was found that, post-MFA implementation, an organization could:

• Achieve up to 164% return on their MFA investment over 3 years with a payback in less than 6 months.
• Improve security and privacy savings through a 50% reduction in risk of a material breach.
• Avoid annual licensing costs of $42 per Salesforce user if you go with the free MFA functionality available from Salesforce products.
• Avoid additional cyber insurance premiums. 
• Improve compliance and avoid potential regulatory fines and lawsuits.
• Implemented with SSO, improve IT operations and employee productivity.
• Improve flexibility for work-from-anywhere environments.
• Avoid brand reputational damage.

MFA offers not only greater protection from cyber attacks but also the potential for valuable cost savings, organizational efficiencies, and maintaining brand trust. And while there will always be challenges to any implementation — cost, time, change management — as one public sector community relations manager interviewed for the study put it, “We were looking for the lowest barrier of entry with the highest level of security without having to educate executives on what MFA is. That was MFA from Salesforce.”

Today, MFA is one of the easiest things an admin can use to better protect their org. And Salesforce provides tools and resources to streamline the effort, including the MFA Rollout Pack and the Multi-Factor Authentication Assistant, which guides you through a recommended rollout process, including requirements evaluation, project planning, launching to users, and encouraging adoption.

We hope this information better equips you to position the value of MFA to your organization’s leaders. For a detailed walk-through of this study, and to learn how businesses can benefit when they safeguard account access with MFA, join us for the Total Economic Impact of MFA for Salesforce Products virtual event on December 15 at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET. See you there!

Resources

• MFA Web Page
• MFA Rollout Pack 
• Multi-Factor Authentication Assistant
• MFA Getting Started Trailblazer Community Group

¹Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.