BYOD AUTHENTICATION
The future of authentication is invisible
Fredrik Gessler, head of product management at Vonage, explains how silent authentication keeps organisations’ data secure in the age of BYOD. No password? No problem.
UC platforms have long been organisations’ main driver of staff cohesion, keeping teams connected across locations, time zones and devices. Slowly but surely, these tools have crept from work devices into employees’ personal devices. The normalisation of hybrid and remote work following the pandemic has scattered workforces across the globe, with 7% of the UK workforce indicating they are ‘very likely’ to become digital nomads in the next three years. But even when employees are still in the office five days a week, today’s ‘always-on’ workforce still wants the option to catch up on emails on
As employees embrace a more flexible working style that combines work with personal lives, it’s inevitable that they’ll adopt bring your own device (BYOD) – whether permitted by their organisations or not. As many as 70% of BYOD devices used in the workplace aren’t managed, meaning they fall outside the control of IT teams and likely lack standard protections like endpoint detection or encryption. In a UC context, this can quickly lead to unauthorised access to sensitive calls and messages. When employee experience becomes a security risk In response to concerns around BYOD, many organisations have upped security measures for internal tools, forcing users to repeatedly enter their password or approve multi-factor authentication requests. This can be counterproductive. Beyond frustrating employees and hampering productivity, excessive manual authentication steps can lead to users abandoning security systems altogether and creating risky workarounds. For instance, employees might opt to reuse the same password again and again or create an overly simplistic password that’s easy for hackers to guess. It’s telling that individuals with high levels of password fatigue are more than twice as likely to experience a data breach compared to those with low fatigue levels (62% vs. 29%). Frustrated users might also choose
Fredrik Gessler head of product management
vonage.co.uk
their way into the office or on their lunch break: 70% of office workers use their smartphone for work purposes.
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