The Latest Trends in Mobile and Cloud Authentication for Enterprises
Duo recently attended the 2013 Gartner Identity & Access Management (IAM) Summit held in Los Angeles. This annual event spans three days and brings Gartner analysts, customers, and vendors together to learn about the latest challenges, solutions, and trends in the IAM market.
Gartner hosted the event to advise on topics such as BYOD and SaaS adoption challenges, leveraging external identities (social and otherwise) to deliver a better customer and partner experience, IAM best practices, security, mobility, and justifying IAM value for businesses.
What were some of the recurring themes of the IAM Summit? Here are a few authentication themes that we heard throughout the event.
Push Authentication
Push-based authentication for smartphones is becoming a popular method for two-factor authentication. Gartner analysts, vendors, and customers are noting that this out-of-band authentication method is gaining traction. For more about Duo Push, the original one-tap authentication method, visit Duo Push: One-Tap Authentication and watch a demo.
Phone-Based Authentication
Authentication methods that leverage the user's phone accounts for 50 percent of the authentication methods used in enterprise today, while the other 50 percent can be attributed to hardware tokens.
Cloud-Delivered Authentication
Cloud-delivered authentication solutions are currently growing at two times the rate of on-premises, customer-hosted solutions. 99.999% was noted as the expected standard for availability.
Risk-Based Authentication
Risk-based authentication (RBA), a dynamic authentication approach that incorporates a number of signals such as IP geolocation and device identifiers, has historically been used in business-to-consumer applications like online banking. RBA is now moving into the enterprise market, particularly in mobile-first organizations. One of the drivers is that typing long passwords or OTPs (one-time passwords) into mobile devices is cumbersome.
Biometric Authentication
Fingerprint (thanks, iPhone 5s!) and voice recognition are some of the most-discussed trends in biometric authentication, particularly for mobile-first use cases. According to Gartner, by the end of 2016, 30 percent of enterprises will employ biometric methods for user authentication from mobile devices, up from 5 percent today.
BYOD Privacy Issues
Privacy issues around Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) vs. Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) mobile devices is a challenge. If I put corporate email on my personal iPhone, does my company get to wipe the entire thing?
Growth of IAM market accelerates with cloud and mobile
While the Identity and Access Management market has existed for decades (WAM, anyone?) it has really gained momentum in the past 5 years. Like many other enterprise software markets, the ubiquity of cloud, mobile, and social has significantly contributed to the rapid growth of IAM.
Cloud-based IAM solutions are beginning to disrupt legacy, on-premises offerings. Mobile security and authentication remain at the forefront of the IAM conversation, which is where Duo will continue to focus as we evolve our product offering for businesses of all sizes.