In an effort to help you enjoy better balance in your life (leave the office ON TIME! Go on vacation and disconnect completely! Show up at your kid’s basketball game/your nephew’s recital/your friend’s happy hour!), we recently kicked off our Smarter Authentication blog series. We know IT and security pros are spread way too thin, with limited resources, time and bandwidth — and in order to get your life back, we suggest you take a look at your enterprise-wide authentication needs.

Let’s take a look at your Core Enterprise Employee Access.

When it comes to protecting internal users, Forrester research found that only four out of 10 firms think their current authentication methods are moderately effective or worse, which isn’t all that surprising. After all, when asked the types of approaches they use to identify employees, the top two authentication methods were passwords (79%) and Q&A (60%). And if that’s not bad enough, many organizations use four or more authentication methods for each user. Clearly, this isn’t effective or efficient — for you or your users!

Providing an easy user experience is all in [an eight-hour] day’s work. 

Securing the doors to your building, providing remote access to your network, logging in to workstations and accessing cloud applications require different approaches and assurance levels. Your enterprise and your users deserve a solution designed to support your specific needs, and one that’s not all-consuming for you and your team.

VPN Access:

Remote teams need fast, secure, seamless access to applications in the digital enterprise. Hardware tokens are time consuming and passwords aren’t secure; the challenge of getting into VPNs, internally and remotely, is a pain point IT can solve. Mobile paired with adaptive authentication and biometrics can protect the business and remove user frustration. Mobile push enables employees to quickly log in to their VPN with just a swipe. Or embed a smart credential on your user’s device to offer physical access and smart card login in addition to VPN access, while ensuring you stay in compliance.

Workstation Login:

Logging into a desktop each day is an often painful ritual. The time it takes to access adds up to a business cost that just shouldn’t exist in a modern digital enterprise. Keeping a desktop system secure is critical and unauthorized access represents a serious threat to the enterprise. Technologies like mobile smart credentials allow employees to log in through just the proximity of the phone, because embedded into it is a system that acts like a virtual smart card. Solutions should offer auto-detect login and logout scenarios, automatic desktop locking, offline solutions and support regulated industries to ensure compliance.

Cloud SSO:

Because of the rapid adoption of the Cloud, there’s a need to decouple credentials for every unique Cloud application so the organization can leverage a single, strong credential. You need frictionless, high assurance methods that protect outside the traditional enterprise security parameters. With Single Sign On (SSO), you’re in. No passwords, no tokens, no cards. Plus, your employees can use the same identity for accessing VPN, workstations and even physical doors to your building.

In other words, authentication needs are changing. Your enterprise — and your personal life — needs a smarter authentication solution. Providing secure, seamless solutions for your employees means less phone calls to the IT help desk. Utilizing a mobile device to access all of your enterprise applications is cost effective, secure and frictionless. And by easily configuring adaptive authentication based on the user type with a point and click solution, you can streamline authentication only when its needed.

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