With the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeping across the globe and impact every aspect of personal and professional life, we find ourselves wondering if now is the time to continue to rely upon decades-old technology that has been proven time and again to be breeding ground for cybercrime. That’s right, we’re talking about the ubiquitous password and the reliance most companies place on it as the sole means of identity authentication and authorization to corporate application and cloud resources.
What Does COVID-19 Have To Do With IT Security?
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has changed all of the rules for how business is operating right now, and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is one of the positions on the front line of firefighting for the security of their respective organizations as more companies are forced into “work from home” scenarios. We’ve discussed how the “Pandemic Forces Work From Home” in a previous blog and according to Time Magazine:
“COVID-19, which has killed more than 8,000 people as the disease sweeps across the world, has prompted cities and areas everywhere to take action, ordering quarantines and lockdowns in an effort to keep people indoors and curb the spread of the coronavirus.”
New phrases like social distancing and shelter in place are now part of our daily vocabulary and cybercriminals are leveraging the fact that most employees will have to use their personal equipment to get work done from home as most companies don’t have enough laptops and smartphones for every employee. So now IT Security should be looking at their Identity Access Management strategies and look to passwordless technologies as today’s “need to have.”
The Rise Of Passwordless Security
First check out our blog titled “The Best Password in 2020 is No Password.” But don’t take our word for it… The globally renowned analyst firm Gartner Group has been writing about the for over a year in a Smarter With Gartner article titled “Embrace a Passwordless Approach to Improve Security” where they suggested organizations to:
“Eliminate centrally managed passwords for better security, fewer breaches, lower support costs and enhanced user experience.”
And then went on to write:
“Passwordless authentication, by its nature, eliminates the problem of using weak passwords. It also offers benefits to users and organizations. For users, it removes the need to remember or type passwords, leading to better user experience and customer experience. For organizations, there’s no longer a need to store passwords, leading to better security, fewer breaches and lower support costs.”
So now is the time to implement a passwordless authentication solution to protect your work form employee reality.
Passwordless Continuous Authentication For Work From Home
To take this one step further you should be looking at passowordless technologies that provide continuous coverage to approach a zero-trust model. Specifically, an approach that evaluates and maintains policy before, during and post authorization.
Acceptto’s eGuardian engine continuously creates, and monitors user behavior profiles based on the user interaction with the It’sMe authenticator. Every time an activity occurs, actionable intelligence is gathered and used to optimize the user profile. eGuardian is capable of autonomously and continually learning new policies and adapting existing ones. While policies can still be manually defined and contribute to the computation, our Biobehavioral AIML approach automatically finds the optimal policy for each transaction. eGuardian leverages a mixture of AI & ML, expert systems and SMEs to classify, detect, and model behavior, and assign real-time risk scores to continuously validate your identity prior to, during and post-authentication.
Download the Intellyx’s whitepaper titled App Authentication Evolves in a World of Compromised Credentials today and then check out what Acceptto can do to ensure your employees, partners and customers can authenticate without passwords and still ensure security and privacy registering for a free demo today.
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