What does multi-factor authentication cost, really? A complete breakdown.

A version of this article was originally published on IT Security Guru.

Most IT teams evaluate multi-factor authentication cost by looking at the pricing page, but license costs rarely paint a full picture. Implementation time, support costs, IT management overhead, end-user friction, and long-term scalability all impact total cost of ownership (TCO). Overlook any, and you're in for a painful budget surprise.

Here's how to calculate how much MFA really costs.

IT teams are used to seeing and evaluating the direct costs of MFA, which include MFA licensing and MFA implementation costs.

Upfront MFA pricing varies widely. To avoid misleading comparisons, it's important to understand different licensing models and how licenses are counted.

• Most MFA solutions have a subscription license model, charging a flat monthly or annual fee per device, user, or integration.

• Others provide a perpetual license, with a large upfront cost for a fixed number of devices, users, or integrations.

• Confirm whether licenses are tied to a specific user ID or the overall number of users.

• Ask about additional charges for extra devices per user, integrations, or additional MFA methods.

Integrating MFA with existing systems can demand significant time and resources. Often, this process requires specialized technical knowledge. This might mean adding new team members or outsourcing to IT specialists to develop an integration plan.

For primarily on-prem Active Directory environments, evaluating cloud-based MFA solutions means also looking at the costs and time to:

• Rewire infrastructure (moving identity from on-prem to a cloud-based identity provider (IdP))

• Upgrade existing licenses, such as with Entra ID

• Recruit or train new expertise on the team to manage new infrastructure.

• Assess and plan deployment, which is often not straightforward

To calculate MFA implementation costs, many teams multiply the hours needed for MFA implementation by their IT department’s hourly labor costs, plus fees for any external specialists.

To calculate the total cost of MFA and TCO, there are also less-obvious hidden costs to consider.

Not all MFA solutions include support with the license fee. Pay special attention to add-ons marked as "onboarding" or "implementation training." These might indicate that you'll need to pay for support.

An MFA deployment can impact productivity for end-users as well as for the IT team.

As best you can, try to estimate:

Depending on the solution (and your environment), MFA solutions may take IT a few hours, days, or weeks to implement. Complicated solutions or unclear documentation raise the chances that you'll make a mistake in implementation, which extends the time you'll spend on implementation. Minimize disruption by testing the MFA solution on a small, pilot group of users. Then, you can do an initial deployment on critical systems, before extending to other applications.

If your MFA solution doesn't integrate with existing infrastructure, you might need to shift to new systems. We commonly see this when a cloud-first MFA solution requires a shift from on-premise Active Directory to a cloud-based identity provider (IdP). Doing this might require skills that your team doesn't have. Estimate the time it may take to learn new skills or recruit the necessary expertise to the team.

Complex MFA processes frustrate end users, and can lead to lockouts and missed deadlines. Your MFA solution needs to allow end users to temporarily skip MFA enrollment, so they don't get locked out of the tools they need to do their job. Test how intuitive the MFA process itself is, too.

Does the MFA prompt guide the end user? Is it obvious what they're supposed to do? Unclear MFA processes and instructions can slow down users and create more help desk tickets for IT.

Any MFA rollout will trigger a few help desk tickets. If you have remote employees, you can expect even more of those. Try to estimate the time IT will spend on help desk tickets and factor that into your budget.

Inflexible MFA policies can get in the way of employees doing critical work. This brings obvious impacts to profitability and to the organization's bottom line. When evaluating MFA solutions, test how granularly you can apply MFA policies.

• Can you control MFA prompt frequency by user, group, and organizational unit (OU)?

• Can you tweak how often to require MFA based on session type? Employee location?

Overzealous MFA-ing can backfire, badly. Not to mention, if MFA gets in the way, management can and frequently does instruct IT to disable it or adjust prompt frequency to "so rare it barely matters anymore." Striking the right balance between security and productivity is key to the business case for MFA.

When you deploy MFA, you'll also incur long-term costs that reach far beyond the initial MFA deployment.

Managing your MFA solution's regular updates and patches can be time-consuming, especially if the MFA solution is complex. Try to understand what's involved in a software update, and what actions implementing updates will require on your end.

If you need to scale the MFA solution across more users, devices, etc., will it be easy? Will costs become an issue if you pass X number of users? To accurately predict long-term costs, estimate future growth as best you can.

Being tied to a specific vendor can lead to additional costs, especially if it forces you into a new ecosystem that doesn’t align with your existing tech stack.