Why You Need A Third Party Tool for Self-Service Password Reset?

The default and recommended security policies and compliances have made it mandatory that the password of a user expires after a specific number of days. If the user doesn’t change the password before the expiry, then his/her account will be locked. S/He will not be able to logon at the workstation until the IT helpdesk reset the password.

The strong password policies such as “old passwords cannot be reused” and “a password should contain an alphabet, number, and special character” had made it difficult for the users to remember their passwords. Because of such policies, the users often note down their password to remember it. However, the administrators advise neither to note down nor to tell anyone else their password because of security reasons. Such situations may lead the users to forget what password they have applied.

Ideally, a user will contact the IT helpdesk to get the password reset and to unlock its account. The number of complaints in an organization to reset the password or to unlock an account ranges from hundreds to thousands depending upon the size of the organization. Such repetitive and collective requests will create an additional burden for the IT helpdesk and in turn, for the Administrator. This could result in a bottleneck situation where IT helpdesk will remain busy in just resetting the passwords and might not get time to focus on other critical issues like server auditing, user monitoring, threat prevention, or dealing with security breaches.

If IT helpdesk department is choked up in handling different queries for any task or multiple password reset requests, then a user has to wait for an indefinite period until the issue gets resolved. This will increase the downtime for a user, especially for a high profile or managerial user it would be a problem. In today’s world where the employees are being paid thousands of dollars on a per hour basis, this would be a loss factor for an organization.

Both IT helpdesk and normal users can face a crunch just because of a password reset or an unlock account complaint. In order to avoid such scenario and to maintain the compliances, the middle way is self-service. Why?

Take an example of a famous hotel where the customers, including the prestigious business clients will wait for their order to be delivered, whereas the cooking staff is overloaded and busy in first creating the dishes, making them presentable and then wait for the waiters to serve the same. If we let the persons create a ready-to-mail using the raw material and serve it themselves, then it not only decreases the wait time but also increases the customer satisfaction. The same cooking staff is just required to prepare the raw material, may be food, but will be relieved from serving the dishes. This will indeed decrease the manpower requirements and result in a low cost business for a hotel.

If the same solution of self-service implemented in an organization where a user can change its expired password and unlock his/her locked account within seconds, then the organization will also get much benefit. The downtime will be decreased very much and the IT helpdesk will be saved from unnecessary password reset or unlock account complaints.

Conclusion

In the absence of a native way to provide self-service password reset and unlock account method, it becomes quite critical for an organization to deal with multiple or collective complaints of password expiration and locked user accounts. A genuine third party tool like Lepide Active Directory Self Service would serve the purpose and would save an organization from unnecessary headaches involved in dealing with such complaints. It delivers a self-service method for the users during the logon to reset their password and to unlock their accounts.