IT administrators are worried about the blending of work and personal in our digital lives: 90% of enterprise IT professionals worry that employee reuse of personal credentials for work purposes could compromise security.
According to a survey from Gemalto, personal applications (such as email) are the biggest worry to organizations. However, six in ten IT decision makers (63%) believe that authentication methods used in the consumer world can be applied to ensure secure access to enterprise applications.
Though you can’t log in to the corporate VPN with your Facebook account―just yet― two-thirds (68%) said they would be comfortable allowing employees to use their social media credentials on company resources.
Moreover, a similar proportion say their security team is feeling the heat to provide as intuitive a login method as these services, with just over half (52%) estimating that in three years’ time, employees and consumers will be using the same credentials to access both corporate and consumer online services.
The explosion of cloud applications in the enterprise is bringing home the need to rid users once and for all from ‘password fatigue.’ To this end, almost half of respondents’ organizations (49%) are planning to implement a solution that provides single-sign on (SSO) to cloud applications, and a similar proportion (47%) agreeing that their organization is under pressure to enable SSO.
Only 35% of organizations completely restrict access to work resources from mobile devices, the survey found, with the majority (56%) enabling access―albeit restricted. This could mean that IT directors who restrict access from mobile are not confident enough in their access control methods to allow their employees more mobile usage. At the same time, these same decision-makers plan to expand the use of 2FA from mobile devices significantly over the next two years (from 37% today to 56% in two years’ time).
Encouragingly, more than nine in ten (94%) enterprises are using two-factor authentication to protect at least one application and nearly all respondents (96%) expecting to use it at some point in the future.
“From credential sharing to authentication practices, it’s clear that consumer trends are having a big impact on enterprise security,” said Franois Lasnier, senior vice president, Identity Protection, at Gemalto. “But businesses need to make sure their data isn’t compromised by bad personal habits. It’s encouraging to see deployment of two-factor authentication methods on the rise, and increased awareness for cloud access management, as these are the most effective solutions for businesses to secure cloud resources and protect against internal and external threats. For IT leaders, it’s important that they keep pushing for security to be a priority at the board level, and ensure that it’s front of mind for everyone in an organization.”
Photo Carlo Toffolo