Our partners at Okta have pulled some revealing stats from both Gartner and Forrester research and their own customer experiences. How many of your Help Desk incidents are related to end-users forgetting their usernames and passwords or requiring a password re-set? Gartner says anywhere from 30% to 50%. And they’re costing you between $20 to $50 per incident to resolve.

Add to that the IT cost of spending 15 minutes each time an employee is added or deleted to a web app and these questions become pricey: How many new employees will your company hire this year? How many employees will leave? Let’s say you have 8 web applications, will add 200 new employees, and will lose 100 employees this year. That’s 600 hours spent on provisioning! What happens when you add more apps or when you’re CEO says the company is going on a hiring spree?

What about integrating your web apps with Active Directory? Some Okta customers have tried it themselves and here’s their average investment: three full-time developers over several months.

Okta announced a self-service Free Trial this week of its on-demand identity and access management service. It takes less than 30 minutes to get started and then IT admins get a full 30 days to try Okta to experience the centralized control and management of their company’s web apps – whether in the cloud or behind the firewall.  An on-demand identity and access management solution means that you can lower IT expenses and increase security practices to protect your enterprise information. It also means you can increase user productivity and satisfaction around your use of web-based applications.

That’s the promise of the cloud...ease of use, high time to value, and low cost for business applications.