Key takeaways:
- An independent Forrester TEI study reveals that deploying Okta’s unified identity security platform yields a 216% ROI over 3 years, $15.5 million in financial benefits, and a payback period of less than six months.
- By unifying access management, identity governance, privileged access, and other identity security capabilities, enterprise organizations achieve a 90% reduction in the likelihood of identity breaches while establishing control over AI agents.
The business impact of identity sprawl
Ask an executive how many identity tools their organization runs, and you'll usually get a pause before the answer: Single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) exist in one silo. Identity governance is layered on later. Privileged access is added after a compliance audit. Each tool was acquired for a legitimate reason, but those point solutions weren’t designed to work together.
Now ask that executive how many AI agents are running in that same environment. The pause gets longer. Most cannot say what those agents can access or what they can do. AI adoption has made the consequences of fragmented identity impossible to ignore.
Most security leaders already understand the tension: AI is advancing faster than fragmented identity tools can keep pace with. What has been harder to prove is the value of resolving it.
In July 2026, Okta commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct an independent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study. Based on interviews with enterprise customers across industries, Forrester modeled a composite organization with 9,000 employees and $3 billion annual revenue.1
Key economic impact highlights
- 216% ROI over 3 years
- $15.5M in total financial benefits
- $10.6M in net present value
- <6 months payback
Behind each of these numbers is an architectural decision about how the organization unified its underlying identity layer.
Beyond vendor consolidation: A unified identity architecture that closes the gaps point solutions leave open
An identity security fabric unifies identity capabilities into a single platform to drive outcomes security leaders prioritize most: breach protection, operational efficiency, and AI visibility and control.
What makes that possible starts with a shared foundation on which several core capabilities run together:
- Access management
- Identity governance
- Privileged access
- Posture management
- Device trust
- Threat detection and response
- Orchestration
Rather than bundling separate products behind a shared interface, a unified architecture functions as a single platform. It shares signals, enforces consistent policy, and responds to threats in real time, covering every identity type, including employees, contractors, non-human identities, and AI agents, across every use case and resource.
Stop breaches before they start. Contain them faster when they do.
Identity is the primary entry point for most enterprise breaches. But detection and response depend on something most organizations lack: a shared signal layer that connects every identity tool in real time. When access management, identity governance, and threat detection operate in silos, a compromised credential in one system does not automatically trigger a response in another. Attackers move laterally while security teams scramble across separate consoles trying to piece together what happened. Every minute of that scramble has a cost.
Forrester found that the composite organization realized the values below with a unified platform:
- 90% reduction in the likelihood of an identity-related breach
- 90% reduction in mean time to remediate identity-related attempted incidents
The stakes are not hypothetical for the security leaders Forrester interviewed:
“A breach in our organization could cost up to $1 billion, and we are required to publicly disclose it. In a financial services environment, that level of exposure would have a significant reputational and business impact. Okta helps us reduce the risk of that happening.”
– IAM staff engineer, fintech
That level of exposure changes how organizations evaluate prevention investments. For organizations already under active attack, the outcome speaks for itself:
“We’ve been targeted several times, and our Okta environment was one of the main targets. What we saw during those attacks was that even if a user password was leaked, attackers were unable to access the system. Since we are now passwordless and require devices to be registered and managed, we have been protected several times with Okta.”
– IAM staff engineer, fintech
The response story is equally clear. Before adopting an identity security fabric, containing an identity incident meant manually tracking down affected accounts, building block lists, and coordinating across tools not designed to communicate. After:
“We no longer have to manually remediate brute force attacks or manage block lists anymore. Okta just takes care of it out of the box.”
– Senior SecOps engineer, software
The hidden cost of identity sprawl compounds. A unified platform changes the math.
Running multiple identity tools does not just create security gaps. It creates operational drag that compounds over time. IT and security teams spend significant time maintaining connections between systems rather than improving security outcomes. That cost rarely shows up on a single budget line. It shows up in hours, headcount, and a backlog of manual work that never fully clears.
The Forrester study puts concrete numbers on the operational efficiency and financial savings that consolidation delivered for the composite organization:
- $2.4M in SaaS cost savings over three years from eliminating redundant applications and reclaiming unused licenses
- 75% reduction in time to onboard new applications
- 50% reduction in IAM support ticket volume by Year 3
- 90% reduction in administrative effort per access certification campaign
- 65% reduction in time required for identity integration during M&A events
The savings surprised even the organizations that made the move:
“Okta is significantly more cost-competitive than our previous tooling; in some cases, it’s several times cheaper than comparable solutions. More than that, it’s actually aligned to what we need.”
– Senior SecOps engineer, software
The operational shift compounds that value. Identity teams that once spent their days manually processing access requests now run a system designed to handle that work automatically:
“Access request tickets have dropped by over 95%. Instead of going back and forth to approve and provision access, users can request access through the catalog, managers approve it, and provisioning happens automatically. From the help desk perspective, there’s essentially no involvement for most requests anymore.”
– IT systems admin, software
AI adoption moves faster when you have the right controls
AI agents and non-human identities are not a future risk. They are a current operational reality that most identity programs were not built to handle. According to our 2026 AI Agents at Work survey, autonomous AI agents are already in widespread or moderate use in 92% of organizations. Of those organizations, 58% experienced an AI-related security issue or close call within the last 12 months. Most of them rely on static API keys or basic authentication, with no governance layer, no audit trail, and no mechanism for revoking access when something changes.
For the TEI study, Forrester treated AI visibility and control as unquantifiable benefits. That reflects where most organizations are: still working out what ungoverned AI access will eventually cost them before they can quantify the value of governing it. What the study makes clear is that the governance foundation has to come first.
A unified identity platform extends the same policy and lifecycle controls to both human and non-human identity types through three baseline safeguards:
- Scoped access: Permissions are strictly limited to what each task requires
- Traceable audit trails: Every action executed by an AI agent is logged and auditable
- Immediate access revocation: Access is immediately revoked across all connected resources when an agent is decommissioned or behaves unexpectedly
The case for establishing AI governance early, before AI deployment scales beyond what any team can retroactively govern, came through clearly in the Forrester interviews:
“We’re still early in our AI adoption, but it’s much easier to establish the right security controls at the beginning than it is to go back later and try to find and govern all of these AI agents.”
– VP of information security, insurance
As that same organization began extending governance to its growing agent environment, the value of a unified foundation became concrete:
“As we deploy AI agents, Okta’s capabilities provide a layer of visibility and control that will be important as we expand our usage.”
– VP of information security, insurance
The organizations building that infrastructure now are not just solving a current problem. They are establishing the foundation that will determine how securely they can scale AI in the years ahead.
Calculate your own identity ROI
The Forrester TEI study uses inputs that reflect one composite organization. Yours will be different. The report provides the full financial framework and underlying assumptions so that you can pressure-test the model against your actual environment.
To customize the ROI model for your organization, substitute your own key values in the report’s "Composite" or “Forrester research” rows. Here are some examples:
- Cumulative cost of an identity-based breach: Substitute your organization's actual or estimated breach cost for the $2.5M baseline. If you operate in a regulated industry, your breach costs often run significantly higher than the research assumption, which shifts the risk-reduction benefit substantially.
- Cost of 1 hour of downtime related to IAM: Input actual IAM downtime costs.
- Point solution spend in prior environment: Aggregate licensing costs across existing identity tools.
Download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study to review the complete methodology and financial breakdown and evaluate it against your own environment.
1 The TEI study is based on interviews with the Okta Platform customers that were used to create a composite customer organization and financial model, which, when applied to a defined case study, found a composite organization can experience the cited benefits. Cited figures represent a three-year, risk-adjusted present value based on the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Okta, July 2026. See the TEI study for more details.
These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and are not intended to be legal, privacy, security, compliance, or business advice.
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