Dreaming of a password-less future?

Many cyber-attacks lately pose a question around the vulnerabilities that compromised credentials create. In an increasingly connected world, the issue of identity, and its inherent connection to security, is more important than ever.

The human factor - your staff, customers and trading partners gaining access to your systems create the number one and most serious vulnerability in your cyber defence. Companies need to re-look at Multi-Factor Authentication systems and eliminate passwords.

The explosion of cloud, mobile devices, and connected things, as well as the consumerization of information technology (IT), has increased the risk of a cyber security attack due to compromised identities, accounts and credentials. A high-profile breach can lead to significant financial and reputational harm.

Despite the increase in credential related breaches and the shifting focus to identities and actions as the mechanism for insight into security events, the majority of organizations are still not leading with this premise.

The reality is, you do not know who accessed your systems if it is with a password. All the password reset, multi-factor authentication and protection systems will not ensure that only the correct individual can access your systems.?Passwords are not safe. They are easily hacked, shared or written down. In some cases, they are issued by call centre agents when OTP messaging is not effective for password resets.

Even though investments in security solutions are yielding positive results, their effectiveness is being marginalized by the emergence of new forces which are threatening to breach newly deployed security solutions.

In addition, organizations and external threats have been evolving in numerous ways, including:

? Explosion in users, identities and environments

? Increased interconnectedness with customers and partners

? Massive amounts of data outside of IT control

? Consumer-oriented technologies and concepts moving into the enterprise

? Malicious actors are becoming more sophisticated and organized

? Insider threats that are as real and perhaps even more lethal than outsider attacks

True multi-factor authentication is only achieved with the deployment of an enterprise Biometric Access System.

You need a user-friendly, flexible, and customizable identity and access management solution, capable of operating within a diverse industry centric architecture. It needs to provide a way to create, change and deliver automated processes to capitalize on the changing demands of the business.

First and foremost, the system has to provide a robust and secure access control environment, incorporating strong authentication methods. The objective is to prevent unauthorized access to the corporate management system, thereby reducing fraud arising from insider threats.

An API management platform has to provide more advanced ways to control access to various applications by the workforce.

By leveraging existing request content and identity stores, it should deploy easily and offer:

? Policy-based authentication

? Coarse and fine-grained authorization

? Single sign-on (using SAML, OpenId Connect, social log-in or OAuth-based federation)

? Support for Common Criteria

? Use FIDO 2.0 and W3C WebAuthn to provide strong user authentication to all applications

There are multiple benefits of an Enterprise Biometric Access system:

1.??????Get rid of passwords! They are not safe.

2.??????Secure Systems access to the modern mobile workforce and customers.

3.??????Full non-repudiated evidence of access and activities in your systems.

4.??????Less user friction with password resets.

Think Biometrics – it is the only unique identifier.