Organisations are challenged to meet demands for greater mobility as 92% of IT departments worldwide still restrict users from accessing sensitive corporate data and resources from mobile devices, new research has revealed.
In a survey of 900 IT decision makers by Gemalto, 98% said they had users who require mobile or remote access and 95% faced obstacles in increasing user mobility, the primary being security concerns.
Almost all respondents (94%) were concerned that their organisation will be breached or hacked as a result of credential theft or compromise. This is exacerbated by the rise in mobile endpoints within organisations, as most organisations reported having, on average, two mobile end points and three sets of credentials per use.
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Additionally, on average, 20% of IT support tickets are resulting from lost or forgotten usernames and passwords, the research found.
In an effort to overcome the security challenges around mobility, the majority of 86% of respondents said they plan to implement two-factor authentication for access to cloud applications.
Currently, 38% of users utilise two-factor authentication, which is expected to rise to over half (51%) of users using it in two years, according to the survey.
More than half (57%) of respondents already used two-factor authentication to secure external users’ access to resources, indicating the varied use of the technology.
And almost all (92%) of them had at least one application protected by two-factor authentication, with cloud applications, web portals and VPNs among the top three apps protected.
As IT continues to look to two-factor authentication to deal with the credentials crunch, 91% of respondents said they are seeking to do this by using cloud-based authentication-as-a-service and managing their organisation’s two-factor authentication centrally. And 90% viewed cloud delivery as a key consideration in the purchasing process of a strong authentication solution.
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“Organisations recognise the need to scale security to protect as many on-premises and cloud applications as possible, especially when sourcing a two-factor authentication solution,” said Garrett Bekker, senior security analyst at 451 Research. “The survey findings suggest that the choice of two-factor authentication will depend on the solution's ability to provide centralised management, as well as secure access to the widest range of applications.”
François Lasnier, senior VP for identity protection at Gemalto, added: "The pressure is on for IT departments to accommodate demands for greater mobility as employees crave new and flexible approaches to working. Organisations that are not open to this change are very likely to be inhibiting business productivity."
