Hacking and cybersecurity attacks are rising, targeting corporate and remote work devices and users.
While authentication solutions, like Single Sign-on (SSO), which requires the user’s username and password to grant application access, have been around and are a popular solution to prevent unauthorised access. It’s easy to guess passwords and gain malicious access to the account through advanced hacking and breach techniques.
Thus, to protect your employee’s identity and secure the data from falling into the hands of malicious hackers, Multi-Factor Authentication solutions play a huge role.
In this article, we’ll learn more about MFA and the benefits of MFA or Multi-Factor Authentication for your organisation. Let’s go!
What Is Mult-Factor Authentication?
Multi-Factor Authentication is the most crucial security measure. It’s an authentication technique that demands multiple authentication factors to complete the user identity and authentication process and grant them access to their accounts or applications.
It uses a variety of different authentication factors. They can be described and broken down as below:
- Factors you know, such as unique information, secret PINs, or security questions.
- Factors you have, such as digital certificates or devices to receive One Time Password (OTP) or physical tokens.
- Factors you are, such as that identify you based on your body, including biometrics, facial recognition, retinal scans, and voice recognition.
Now, let’s get into the importance of MFA and some of the most critical MFA advantages for your organisation.
What Are The Advantages Of Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication?
Here are the most important Multi-Factor Authentication advantages for your organisation.
1. Enhanced Security
According to the statistics, 80% of all data breaches are because of password compromises. Especially today, as the remote working environment situations have become the new normal, it has exposed the employee’s weak credentials to the cyber attackers.
This has significantly increased the risks of phishing and data breaches, making it easier for hackers to access users’ accounts.
Thus, to prevent these risks, relying only on passwords can cost your organisation big time. As MFA adds an extra layer of authentication, it significantly improves your network’s security, making it difficult for hackers to break into your employee’s accounts and access sensitive data and applications.
2. Prevents Credentials And Device Thefts
Credentials and device thefts are common, again, especially because of the remote working locations. For example, if your employees work from remote cafes and someone glances at their device to peek into the credentials they use to log in to their systems, you can lose the valuable data in no time.
MFA prevents credentials theft by eliminating the Single Sign-On and ensuring the user logs in through multiple authentication factors to access their accounts. So, even if someone knows the credentials, they cannot pass the second authentication step because of the lack of unique identifiers only the employees possess.
Moreover, when MFA is combined with full-disk encryption, it also efficiently protects against device theft and other associated risks.
3. Meets Regulatory Compliance Requirements
MFA makes achieving compliance and regulation with data security laws and regulations easier. For instance, PCI-DSS requires the implementation of MFA in specific situations to avoid unauthorised and unauthenticated user access.
MFA is also a good way to protect employees’ credentials and increase the organisation’s credibility, trust, and reputation.
Conclusion
Every enterprise and organisation possess critical and sensitive business data and information and relying on passwords, and password-protected traditional solutions no longer helps combat the modern cybersecurity threats.
Thus, to leverage the MFA advantages for businesses, choose suitable MFA solutions, like InstaSafe products, for your organisation’s benefit.