Currently, 70% of people across the world work remotely at least one day a week, and over 53% of people work remotely for at least half of the week, according to IWG who surveyed over 18,000 business professionals across 96 international companies.
Increased mobility does help improve employee satisfaction, but it also changes many enterprise dynamics – including security. As the future of work is rapidly changing, companies across industries are opting to reduce costs while supporting the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce.
With over 40% of the global workforce expected to be mobile by 2022, authentication platforms need to be flexible and facilitate standardization. There is a balance that each enterprise will need to establish between security and employee flexibility in order to drive productivity.
But as flexibility and immediate access are demanded by the mobile workforce, most IT departments are facing increasing demand on their time due to legacy systems, new regulations, and the ever increasing frequency and inevitability of security breaches. A root cause of breaches is that employees continue to rely on weak passwords and often fall prey to phishing attacks.
Not to mention, in large global organizations, siloed IT teams adopt a slew of solutions to meet employee access needs. This has led to these large companies using a variety of soft and hard tokens, pass cards, and fobs in order to increase security.
At least for one Swiss bank, the chaos of security regulations created unwanted friction, as it meant that as employees traveled from one country to another they needed to have a different token for each country, and sometimes per application in order to work remotely. Moreover, tokens can be lost or forgotten, which equated to thousands of hours of lost productivity. The bank required a truly flexible and adaptive solution for their employees.
Biometric Authentication
Enter biometrics. One thing that we never forget is our mobile phone. A natural transition is using your phone as part of an authentication platform. As a result, many institutions across the globe are investing in biometric authentication for their remote employees.
Financial institutions are especially keen to adopt biometric authentication, as they face with higher security requirements due to regulations. One Swiss bank, in particular, is eliminating passwords entirely at employee terminals in order to improve identity and access management across the organization. You can learn how they’re doing this at the Gartner IAM show in Las Vegas next week, where our CEO James Stickland will be presenting the Swiss bank case study and showing live demos.
