The most obvious and easiest to calculate is the reduction in administrative effort required to manage NOS implementations. This is potentially a much greater cost saving but is very hard to calculate. Many of the leading industry analysts have derived estimates for the cost of security breaches in most organizations. They have also determined that a large proportion of this cost is attributable to internal staff. One of the key factors involved in reducing this cost can be to ensure that only authorized employees have access to the Network Operating System.
Many organizations have no way of automatically disabling or removing the accounts of ex-employees.
In some cases ex-employees can have unauthorized access to corporate systems for many months after they leave. There is a large difference between a good NOS directory and a bad one, and the cost savings will depend on the current NOS environment. This addresses only the cost savings and does not include any incremental revenue or even the improved peace of mind and reduced cost of security. The numbers presented above represent a very rough calculation of return on meta directory investment. They do provide a framework which can be used to build a business case for building these services.