Internet Service Providers face a significant support cost due to users who forget their network connection or e-mail password.
As ISPs scale to hundreds of thousands and millions of end customers, the cost to support repetitive problems such as password resets rises to significant levels, reaching millions of dollars annually.
Given the significant cost, it is advantageous to invest in automation to eliminate recurring user support problems. Password reset is often the most common problem, and is arguably the easiest problem to address with self-service technologies.
17. Password Management for ISP Subscribers
8 Conclusions
Password reset problems are a costly, recurring problem at most I.T. help desks, including customer support
lines in an ISP.
Password reset problems are relatively simple to resolve using automation, where a user either dials into an
IVR server with a telephone or accesses a self-service web site; identifies himself; authenticates himself;
and resets his own passwords.
Hitachi ID Password Manager is a mature password management system, which can scale to address the
challenging technical and usability requirements of a large ISP.
Deployment of Password Manager in a large ISP with several hundreds of thousands of subscribers can
yield cost savings on the order of $1M to $3M/year.
The bottom line is that effective password management technology can be deployed very quickly (2-3
months), and yield significant cost savings to an ISP, with time-to-ROI measured in months.
www.Hitachi-ID.com
500, 1401 - 1 Street SE, Calgary AB Canada T2G 2J3 Tel: 1.403.233.0740 Fax: 1.403.233.0725 E-Mail: sales@Hitachi-ID.com
File: /pub/wp/psynch/documents/isp/password_reset_isp_3.tex
Date: November 29, 2002