Organizations plan MFA, biometrics deployments to address lagging approaches

Many organizations have yet to deploy highly-secure multi-factor authentication, such as with biometrics, that even their own IT departments consider robust, according to new research released by BIO-key and Osterman Research.

More than 290 security and IT professionals from medium-sized and large organizations were surveyed, resulting in a whitepaper on ‘Why Zero Trust is Important’ and an ebook on ‘The State of MFA’. They show current practices diverge from what the professionals see as best practices.

MFA is widely used, with 70 percent of employees and 40 percent of customers required to use it, but only 29 percent of organizations have implemented passwordless authentication workflows so far. A further 40 percent plan to do so eventually, though on the consumer or customer side passwordless workflows are even further behind.

The MFA survey also shows that while 60 percent of respondents see biometrics as one of the most secure MFA methods, the technology is only used by 27 percent of employees and 13 percent of customers. The majority of IT decision-makers intend to increase their investment in MFA in general, and biometrics in particular.

The Zero Trust whitepaper explains the importance of continuous real-time identity verification, and the attacks motivating its adoption.

PortalGuard wins college MFA customer

Grand Rapids Community College is the latest customer to select PortalGuard as its identity and access management solution to secure data and applications across its western Michigan campuses.

The college sought to upgrade its single sign-on (SSO) solution to eliminate password fatigue for higher user satisfaction, and stronger security through the adoption of MFA.

BIO-key’s PortalGuard was selected through a competitive bidding process, which the company attributes to its features for assisting the onboarding of first-time users, enhanced remote access security with adaptive authentication for off-campus logins, and ability to handle over 400,000 users.

The company reported a 38 percent increase in revenues for its ‘Identity Bound Biometrics’ and IAM solutions in its latest quarterly earnings report.

Article Topics

access management  |  authentication  |  BIO-key  |  biometrics  |  cybersecurity  |  enterprise  |  identity management  |  multifactor authentication  |  PortalGuard  |  Zero Trust