Password buffoonery costing mid-sized firms £130k a year

Survey claims annual productivity losses per employee sustained from password-related headaches are now running at £261

An average 500-person firm is now losing £130,500 a year to staff struggling with passwords, according to identity management vendor Centrify.

Respondents to Centrify's survey were asked to estimate how many minutes of their working week are sapped by managing passwords. This could include time spent entering login details, trying to locate the correct password or talking to IT to reset passwords.

Centrify multiplied this by the average amount workers were paid to reach an average annual loss figure of £261 per worker.

This means an average 100-person firm loses £26,000 a year due to poor password management, Centrify claimed. For an average mid-sized firm with 500 staff, that figure rises to £130,500. This is not to mention the potential costs associated with the security risks surrounding poor password management, Centrify added, particular as the survey found half of desk-workers now use their personal devices for business purposes.

More than a quarter of the 1,000 respondents, who were consumers in the US and UK, indicated they enter 11 or more passwords a day, equating to 4,000 passwords a year.

Some 41 per cent of UK respondents described forgetting a password for an online account to which they needed immediate access as "very annoying". This is more than the percentage that described as "very annoying" misplacing keys (39 per cent), having their mobile phone battery die (37 per cent) and getting a spam email (31 per cent).

Seventeen per cent of UK respondents said they would set their mobile phone ringtone as Macarena for a year if it meant they no longer had to manage their passwords. Seven per cent thought the prospect of having root canal treatment a fair trade-off.

Meanwhile, one in three respondents said they have been forever locked out of an account due to forgetting the password.

Barry Scott, EMEA chief technology officer at Centrify, said: "In our new digital lifestyles, which see a blurring of the lines between personal and professional lives, we are constantly having to juggle multiple passwords for everything from email and mobile apps to online shopping and social media."

"According to our survey, over a quarter of us now enter a password online more than 10 times a day, which could mean 3,500 to 4,000 times a year. This is becoming a real challenge for employers who need to manage security and privacy concerns and for employees who are costing their companies time and money."