What Forrester’s TEI Report Reveals About Modernizing Enterprise Access
For years, enterprises have relied on legacy access control architectures that were designed for a very different world—centralized offices, predictable devices, and trusted networks. While many of these systems still “function,” Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Portnox Cloud makes clear that their ongoing business impact is increasingly unsustainable.
As workforces decentralize, device diversity explodes, and zero trust becomes a baseline expectation, the shortcomings of legacy access control show up not as isolated technical issues, but as systemic costs—to productivity, resilience, security posture, and growth.
The TEI study reveals that the true cost of maintaining outdated access control isn’t just measured in infrastructure spend. It’s measured in lost time, operational fragility, elevated risk, and slowed transformation.
Cost #1: Legacy Access Control Consumes Disproportionate IT Resources
Traditional access control platforms impose a hidden operational tax on IT and security teams.
Forrester’s interviews show that enterprises routinely dedicate multiple full‑time engineers to keep legacy access control environments functional—managing upgrades, troubleshooting authentication failures, recovering from outages, and maintaining brittle infrastructure dependencies.
In the TEI composite organization:
- Three full‑time engineers spent more than 60 hours per week collectively maintaining legacy access systems
- Expertise was highly specialized, creating operational silos and succession risk
- Routine maintenance tasks routinely escalated into firefighting exercises
After modernizing access control with Portnox Cloud, ongoing administration dropped to approximately one hour per week, representing a 90% reduction in access‑related labor.
For enterprises, this isn’t just an IT efficiency gain—it’s the ability to redirect scarce security talent toward higher‑value initiatives like risk reduction, resilience planning, and strategic modernization.
Cost #2: Fragile Access Systems Create Enterprise‑Wide Downtime Risk
Legacy access control architectures often represent a single point of failure for large segments of the enterprise.
Forrester found that authentication services tied to on‑prem infrastructure directly translated system outages into business outages. Power events, hardware failures, or routine maintenance frequently resulted in:
- Loss of network access for thousands of users
- Inability for devices and applications to authenticate
- Cascading failures across VPNs, wireless networks, and critical services
- Several organizations reported monthly access‑related outages, some lasting days.
By contrast, Portnox Cloud’s high‑availability, cloud‑native architecture reduced access‑related downtime by 95%, recapturing 34 hours of productivity per year in the composite organization.
At an enterprise level, reliable access control isn’t a convenience—it’s a prerequisite for operational continuity.
Cost #3: Limited Visibility and Control Increase Security Exposure
One of the most significant—and least visible—costs of legacy access control is risk blind spots.
Organizations interviewed by Forrester acknowledged gaps such as:
- Incomplete visibility into what devices were accessing enterprise resources
- Manual, error‑prone processes for approving devices and identities
- Personal or unmanaged devices accessing sensitive systems
- Expanding IoT and contractor ecosystems with inconsistent enforcement
- These gaps undermine zero trust principles and create opportunities for lateral movement and unauthorized access.
By enforcing centralized, identity‑ and device‑level access control, Portnox Cloud helped organizations reduce exposure to addressable attacks by 75%, equating to $1.3 million in avoided breach risk over three years for the TEI composite organization.
For security leaders, this represents a measurable improvement in risk posture—not just improved compliance.
Cost #4: Legacy Access Control Limits Enterprise Scalability
As enterprises grow globally, merge environments, or adopt hybrid work models, legacy access architectures often become an impediment to scale.
Forrester’s interviews highlighted common enterprise‑scale constraints:
- Physical appliances required for site expansion
- Long lead times for procurement and deployment
- Inflexible support for diverse operating systems and device types
- Inconsistent security enforcement across regions and acquisitions
- In some cases, organizations delayed site openings or struggled to integrate acquisitions because access control simply couldn’t scale fast enough.
After transitioning to Portnox Cloud:
- New site onboarding dropped from days to hours, and sometimes minutes
- Enterprises scaled to thousands of new users without adding IT staff
- Global expansion no longer required infrastructure expansion
- Modern access control becomes a growth enabler—not a bottleneck.
Cost #5: Poor Access Experiences Drain Productivity at Scale
Access control failures don’t just affect IT—they affect everyone.
Forrester found that legacy access systems frequently degraded user experience through:
- Slow and unreliable authentication
- Frequent connection failures
- Recurring help desk tickets
- Network interruptions during active workflows
- In one organization, users waited 10 seconds or more to authenticate—hundreds of times per year.
By modernizing access control, organizations reduced access‑related productivity loss by 80% and cut help desk tickets from dozens per day to dozens per month across the enterprise.
At scale, faster access doesn’t just save time—it restores confidence in IT and eliminates daily friction.
The Business Impact of Modern Access Control
Forrester’s TEI study makes one conclusion clear: legacy access control silently erodes enterprise performance.
Across the composite organization, replacing outdated access architectures with Portnox Cloud delivered:
- $6.8 million in risk‑adjusted benefits over three years
- 287% ROI
- Payback in under six months
When viewed through a business lens, modernizing access control isn’t simply a network upgrade—it’s a foundational investment in security resilience, operational efficiency, and enterprise agility.