Totalling up ROI Costs for Identity Projects (con’t)

Totaling up Identity Project Costs:

Continuing our look at trying to figure out an ROI on Identity
Projects.

Today is the listing of the information you might gather to help
you determine what Identity ROI might mean to your organization.

First: list of costs you may want to include in your
calculations…

1. Acquisition license costs of:

   
   

Identity Provisioning
Software
Repository Database
Application Server
OS’s
Required
Utilities required – Monitoring, Virus protection,
backup, etc.
Any additional licenses needed by individual
environments that current don’t have them now (perhaps additional
LDAP or Access Manager licenses)

2. Maintenance of same for next 3 years (if not sure, assume
   18%)

   
   

3. Hardware purchased to run software:
   

   
   

Servers
Load
balancers
Firewalls
Storage
Backup
Include all hardware
including Development, Testing, QA, and Production. (Don’t forget any
disaster recovery sites that will need to be kept ready.)

4. Maintenance of the hardware for the next 3 years (18%
   assumption again if not sure).

   
   

5. Implementation Consulting – Partners hired to help
   define business processes, design architecture, build adapters,
   implement IdM instances, and testing/deployment. May be the largest
   charge in the first few years.

   
   

6. Increases in IT IdM Staff – While IdM can lower the
   overall IT admin burden by digitally provision to corporate systems,
   the core IdM team will need to be built out to manage the IdM system
   and administer it. Usually plan on 2-3 dedicated staff if you
   continue to add to IdM in the coming years. Someone has to manage
   the projects and resolve provisioning issues.

   
   

7. New resource adapter development. Every adapter will need
   some work to customize it for the environment. Some will have to be
   built from scratch. Estimate the work to be done. We used $15K for
   easy adapter, $30K for medium challenge, and $100K as hard. May be
   much less, but at this point, be conservative and use worse case
   scenarios.

   
   

8. Upgrade to IdM site yearly – You may not be able to
   accurately predict the future, but put some money in the estimate of
   what it will cost to upgrade the IdM software each year. 4-6 weeks
   should be enough to install, test, and migrate changes to new
   versions released by the vendor.

   
   

9. Training – Include in the cost budget any training
   required by your team, in IdM, Identity, etc.

   
   

10. User group meetings – Yeah, you will want to attend
    User Group meetings to learn more. Put it in the budget – the
    boss can always say no later.

    
    

Think that captures most of the costs of running the project.
Total it up and it will be a formidable number. But remember, this
IdM projects are usually enterprise wide projects.

Relax until the next entry, where we review the tangible benefits
coming from the project. Should be in next week.

Advertisements