Accenture adoption, SecureAuth survey show rise of passwordless authentication

Passwordless authentication methods such as biometric and PIN-based logins are gaining ground, according to research and the latest moves from companies such as Accenture.

The consulting firm has spent the last three years transitioning more than 600,000 employees to passwordless methods, according to Axios. The move was prompted by the friction that comes with  traditional passwords. Accenture used to require that employees reset their passwords every 75 days.  The result was so many employees forgetting them that the company had to dedicate n some of its IT team just to resetting passwords.

With the help of Microsoft, the company rolled out passwordless login through pilots with smaller groups of employees, with some logins based on biometrics.

Merim Becirovic, global CTO of Accenture’s IT organization, told Axios that the move to passwordless came after the company moved its key assets to one place in the cloud. This eliminated questions about which networks are connected online, which servers they want to run the passwordless technology on and where to store backup data for logins and other ancillary processes.

“When you’re in the cloud, you can focus more on the business capability you are trying to enable, and that is my opinion of where the scale and speed come from,” Becirovic says.

Survey shows the passwordless trend is spreading

Almost two-thirds of respondents have either adopted passwordless authentication or are planning on rolling it out in less than two years, a new survey from access management company SecureAuth has shown.

The 2023 Authenticate Pulse survey probed one hundred senior decision-makers, including vice presidents, chief experience officers, IT security architects and senior department heads. Among them, 36 percent said they use passwordless authentication methods while 42 percent said they plan to introduce it.

However, the most represented form of access management and authentication is still traditional multi-factor authentication (80 percent), followed by single sign-on (79 percent) and two-factor authentication (60 percent). Passwordless methods ranked just fourth but they came out on top in the list of authentication methods most likely to be implemented in the future.

Almost two-thirds of users (61 percent) said they were dissatisfied with the friction caused by legacy MFA, according to the survey which was conducted by Gatepoint Research.

“With over 80 percent of cyberattacks occurring at the credential level, it has become the weakest link,” says Paul Trulove, CEO of SecureAuth. “The survey results reveal that organizations are clearly adopting a modern authentication approach to have a more robust security approach and a frictionless experience for their users.”

SecureAuth recently announced partnerships with Idmworks and Opkalla to distribute its behavioral biometrics and passwordless product Arculix. The company also expanded integrations of Arculix with Citrix Workspace.

Article Topics

Accenture  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  enterprise  |  passwordless authentication  |  SecureAuth