MFA - Why all businesses should know about it
What is MFA?
MFA is a system to ensure you’re who you say you are, it ultimately offers an additional layer of protection against potential cyber-attacks.
Individuals not authorised to access your systems may be able to compromise your passwords with a simple phishing email. In other words, one of those suspicious looking emails that are becoming harder to spot with a click-out link that you do your best to avoid!
Unfortunately, once clicked they can compromise your passwords in seconds. The best defence against this? Yes, you guessed it, MFA.
Once that first layer of protection is broken, MFA will halt them in their tracks by requiring that second piece of information.
MFA is split into three key areas;
- Something you know – It could be a password or pin
- Something you have – It could be a card or key
- Something you are – It could be biometrics such as your fingerprint.
Why should you be using it?
- Increases Security
As outlined above the ultimate benefit to MFA is security. MFA can come in many forms, and you’ll be used to using it for banking apps, general log ins, and so on. One example is that annoying ‘thanks for logging in, now type in the code we just sent your mobile phone’, but that second line of defence is so important. In the real world, it’s a simple and effective way to protect fraudsters taking sensitive data or money.
- Mitigates Risk
No risk is ever completely mitigated, but reducing risk is key in business. The decisions we make for our businesses every day contain risk but working out the value of that risk is key for any stakeholder. The questions we should be asking is “What simple changes can we make to reduce large amounts of risk?”. MFA falls into this category and every business should be implementing this, yesterday!
- Higher standards
We all want higher standards for our business so, why do so many business owners turn a blind eye to the importance of security? Is it because of a knowledge gap? Is it because it’s scary because we prefer to ignore it? Or is it because it can be costly to continuously stay on top of it?
Actually, I think it is a combination of all of the above, but when you offset that against the statistics that the average breach costs a business ￡8,640 and 60% of SMB’s go out of business in the 6 months following an attack, I would argue it isn’t a cost at all but a necessity for all businesses to have protection in place.
What can you do about it?
Our aim here is to show you how simple some of the security controls can be to keep your business protected. Ultimately there is a lot more that needs to be done, so if you require further information, bzb IT will be able to discuss MFA alongside a whole suite of IT managed services for your business.