Identity Authentication: Ensuring the Integrity of Your Systems

Today's businesses rely on digital technologies far more than ever before. Digital industry ecosystems are emerging as the supply chain choice of a most industries; requiring digital connectivity between all parties in the supply chain to facilitate better product planning and ability to serve the markets and customers. Governments are relying on technology to more deeply engage, inform and serve their population. Consumer in most markets have had no choice but to default to ecommerce to have even the most basic necessities delivered during these times of social distancing and lockdowns. In spite of this, millions still rely on the most basic of security features to secure these highly critical, and yet mostly fragile, networks of commerce. Passwords are still used as the default for security. Threat actors know this, which is why millions of passwords appear on the Deep Web markets every year. They are stolen, sold, traded and ultimately used to break into networks and systems the world over. The only way to prevent this activity, and to implement a more mature security environment is through identity authentication. This means not just trusting to a password, but actively following up with other challenges to the identity of the user, device or application, eventually being able to dispense with passwords altogether and relying on more robust identifiers for security purposes. However, whilst IDC believes IT buyers should already have MFA solutions included within their present year security software budgets; if not, include such next year and that this is a must-do security thing, but we believe current market acceptance rates to be a disappointing 30% or less. That means 7 out of 10 users are all still making up passwords. The IDC presentation will take a closer look into the advanced authentication market and provide guidance to technology buyers on what to look for in such an important solution.