Hey everyone! 👋 New to the forum but been lurking for a bit. I'm a data analyst trying to get a better handle on the tech stack side of things, especially around identity and access.
My team is evaluating Ping Identity, and like any good analyst, I went straight for their ROI calculator. I gotta say, it feels... overly optimistic. It asks for inputs like "average time spent on password resets" and "cost of a security breach," but then seems to multiply everything into these huge, almost unbelievable annual savings. In my world, if a dashboard model had assumptions this broad, we'd poke a million holes in it.
I'm really skeptical about the real-world numbers behind it. Has anyone here actually gone through a full implementation and seen the hard savings?
* **What were the actual, measurable reductions in help desk tickets?** (We track ours in Zendesk, so a percentage drop would be awesome to hear.)
* **Did the self-service features truly reduce admin hours?** If so, by how much?
* **Were there any hidden costs during implementation or ongoing maintenance that the calculator wouldn't account for?**
I'd love to hear from folks who've been through it. Not just the high-level "it's great," but the actual before-and-after metrics you tracked. My manager is asking for a data-backed business case, and the vendor's calculator alone isn't going to cut it. Any detailed walkthroughs or lessons learned would be a lifesaver!
You have the right instinct. Those calculators are built to sell, not to audit. We did a Ping rollout two years ago, and the real savings were real, but different.
The calculator's huge breach-avoidance number is a hypothetical that's impossible to measure directly, so we ignored it. The tangible win was in help desk tickets. We saw a 38% reduction in password-related tickets in the first six months post-launch, which held steady. That's a hard Zendesk metric.
On your hidden costs question, the big one was internal training and change management. The tech works, but if people don't know how to use the self-service portal, they just call the desk anyway. We spent more on internal comms and short videos than we budgeted. Also, don't forget the ongoing admin time for managing the Ping system itself - it's less than the old way, but it's not zero.
Sample size matters.
Your instinct to question the breach cost multiplier is spot on. Those figures are almost always derived from industry reports like the IBM Cost of a Data Breach study, which provide an average cost per record. Vendors then apply your total user count, which creates a massive, theoretical liability that no internal finance team would ever recognize as a realized saving.
On your admin hours question, it's critical to differentiate between *saved* hours and *reallocated* hours. In our case, the self-service portal reduced tier-1 help desk time spent on resets by an average of 20 hours per week. However, those hours weren't eliminated. They were absorbed into other support tasks, and the identity admin's workload increased by roughly 5-10 hours monthly for system maintenance, reporting, and policy updates. The net FTE saving was negligible, but the shift in labor to higher-value work was the actual benefit.
The biggest hidden cost not in any calculator is the "integration tax." The base license might cover your core apps, but each legacy system or custom application often requires additional configuration work, middleware, or even professional services hours to properly federate. This can balloon the initial project cost by 15-25% if your environment isn't purely modern SaaS.
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Your point about training costs is crucial. We had a similar experience where we integrated SSO with our CI/CD pipeline tools. The technical deployment was smooth, but adoption lagged until we created role-specific runbooks showing exactly how to trigger builds with the new auth.
Also, that "hard Zendesk metric" is the gold standard. It's easy to translate directly into FTE savings for leadership. The breach avoidance numbers are purely for the business case deck, not the post-mortem.
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.