Hard tokens are expensive and high maintenance. It is no secret that contact centers have exceptionally high churn, meaning that many of those costly hard token devices are not making their way back into the company's hands. Replacing them costs money, tracking them down costs money, and managing them (assigning, unassigning, and monitoring) costs money.
For the sake of simplicity, let's say you have a team of 100 agents. 100 hard tokens such as Yubikeys would cost $4500 before factoring in any negotiated discounts or bulk pricing. To implement something like RSA SecurID an organization would need to be prepared to spend $10,000.00 MSRP for 100 devices. There are several other examples that we could use, but the point is that contact centers simply do not have the budget, manpower, or time to spend managing hard tokens such as these.
The adoption of hard tokens also brings the necessity for IT support for when they don't work, get lost, or the batteries die. According to a study done by Veridium, “Tokens and smartcards can cost companies millions, regardless of industry”. In the same research conducted by Veridium, they reviewed the monetary impact of 3 organizations across 3 industries, and the results showed that security hardware, support for said hardware, and friction of inefficient security measures is costing organizations well into the millions.
Consider the scenario in which an employee quits or gets fired. Your organization has a choice to make: try to get the hard token back, or write it off and purchase a new one. While it would obviously be preferable to recycle the hardware, it turns out that convincing an outgoing employee to go through the effort of mailing the token back can be outright impossible. Even if they are willing to send it back, the process of reassigning the key to a new user can be so time-consuming, confusing, and frustrating that many IT departments simply give up and eat the cost of issuing a new token.
This means that for a 100-employee team, with an industry average of 150% turnover, an organization actually ends up purchasing an additional 150 keys over a year! With churn factored in, the $4,500 for Yubikeys becomes over $11,000, and the $10,000 for SecurID tokens becomes $25,000. This is not only expensive but also profoundly wasteful. Throwing thousands of hardware tokens away each year is not sustainable from either an environmental standpoint or a business one.
With Twosense Passive or Continuous MFA, organizations can deploy MFA in a contact center environment for a team of 100 for as little as $3600 for the year. Unlike hard tokens, Twosense does not require organizations to assign, reassign, or manage seats or devices. By design, Twosense only counts people actively using the software in the last 30 days. This helps reduce significant friction for administrators and reduces wasteful spending.
Over the past several years, and particularly over the last few months, biometric factors have rapidly increased in popularity. This is both out of necessity to adopt innovative solutions, but also because of the initiatives of the OMB and the Biden administration to proactively move towards true zero trust in both the private and public sectors.
Implementing behavioral biometrics such as Twosense Passive MFA or Continuous MFA into contact centers’ identity security postures enables organizations to do what was previously impossible: deploy MFA everywhere, to every user without increasing user friction or negatively impacting their ability to serve customers. An added bonus is that since each factor is unique to each user, both Twosenses Passive and Continuous MFA are phishing-resistant by design.
To learn more about how Twosense can reduce your security costs, bring your contact center up to compliance, and provide better security, please request your private demo here.