Your login process is killing productivity—Here’s the data

Chip Hughes, Chief Product Officer, Imprivata

In industries where seconds matter, workers are losing minutes, sometimes hours, trying to log in to the systems they need to do their jobs. Clinicians struggle with repeated timeouts while patients wait. Manufacturing lines stall while frontline workers reset complex passwords. Police officers face constant reauthentication that slows down reporting and response times. What was once viewed as “just an IT issue” has become, in fact, a major drag on productivity, morale, and the bottom line.

The hidden cost of security friction

We often think of downtime as a server outage or a cyberattack. But hidden downtime is happening every day in the form of login delays and authentication hurdles. In healthcare, for example, research shows clinicians lose an average of 45 minutes per shift to slow or repeated logins. Multiply that across a 40-hour work week, and the wasted time adds up to more than six hours per clinician every week.

In manufacturing, technicians arriving for their shift may spend 10 minutes wrestling with password resets and multifactor authentication (MFA), holding up production lines and delaying orders. In law enforcement, repeated reauthentication across multiple applications has been shown to slow report filing and increase stress for officers in the field. These are more than just inconveniences—they represent a systemic problem that slows down productivity at scale.

Compliance risks and security breaches

Ironically, the very controls designed to keep organizations safe often create new risks. According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, 80% of breaches stem from compromised credentials. Despite their intended purpose to protect data and secure systems, passwords have become one of the biggest security vulnerabilities.

Poor access workflows often require remembering and frequently changing long complex passwords, repeatedly reauthenticating via MFA, and abiding to rigid policies like session time-outs. Instead of enforcing compliance, these workflows often push workers to find workarounds like credential sharing, leaving organizations more vulnerable to both internal and external threats.

In fact, recent research from Imprivata and the Ponemon Institute found that 54% of organizations experienced breaches tied to shared credentials in 2024. Downtime from cyber incidents is also expensive—$49 million on average, with 75 days required for recovery, according to Cisco research. And with the average cost of a data breach reaching a record high of $4.88 million in 2024, security friction and poor access workflows are a risk organizations can no longer afford to ignore.

Logins are stealing more than time

But the financial toll doesn’t stop with breaches or compliance violations. Day-to-day access issues, from lost mobile devices to forgotten passwords, add up to staggering downtime and support costs. Organizations lose an average of 872 hours every week to device-related disruptions, coming at an annual price tag of $1.4 million in IT support and productivity loss, according to data from Imprivata and the Ponemon Institute.

The pressure to enhance productivity by doing more with less is only increasing, as 79% of leaders now rank productivity as the top measure of ROI. When outdated access systems waste hours and frustrate already under-resourced staff, they slow productivity, contribute to stress, and actively undermine the returns organizations expect from their technology investments—resulting in reduced efficiency and impacting the bottom line.

Beyond IT: Turning access into a competitive advantage

It’s time to stop viewing poor access processes and security friction as just an IT problem, but rather as a core business issue that affects operations and finance as much as IT and security. Inefficient logins drain productivity, frustrate staff, and increase business risk.

The good news is that the solution is here. Organizations that streamline access through simple and secure modern access management processes are already realizing measurable gains, including:

These stats go beyond just IT metrics to represent the holistic operational and financial results that directly improve ROI, workforce productivity, and compliance readiness.

Modernize access and reclaim productivity

Poor login processes are hidden drains on revenue, morale, and operational performance. From wasted hours and burnout to compliance failures and multimillion-dollar downtime events, outdated authentication is killing productivity. By modernizing identity and access workflows, organizations can align IT, operations, and finance priorities to enhance efficiency without sacrificing security.

Want to hear how industry leaders are tackling these challenges head-on?

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