IT Challenges of the Business World

It’s not fair to say that the back-end operations of companies here and there are crumbling. They’re managing as managers are supposed to even if the IT rigmarole isn’t fun. That’s thanks to an ever-changing world where those vested with the responsibility of providing the latest security patches and operating environments are saddled with the fruits of others’ malicious intent, and the large software manufacturers are always coming down on IT managers to make their product safer for everyone. Updates to multifactor authentication (MFA) are becoming more prevalent in these environments, but it’s just not enough.

However, in the last few years, “cybersecurity” has almost become a self-contradictory phrase: If it’s on the Internet, it ain’t safe. It doesn’t matter if someone’s paying bills or storing private diary entries, and when one thinks about it, these aren’t any different from one another because they both comprise private information. It’s not certain what a malicious user would want to do with one’s diary, but credit card and social security numbers are two compelling points for someone of ill mind to breach databases and put their necks on the line for five- or six-figure killings. Regardless, faulty MFA and lazy implementation of single sign on (SSO) is the ironic unbecoming for some security systems.

Businesses Are High-Priority Targets

It’s not that businesses themselves are the targets of hackers per se; it’s more that businesses are, well, businesses: They’re conglomerates of people. They have clients who exchange money for goods and services, and that means there must be a database somewhere that valuable information can be pried from. Security measures have reached a point of trapping out the legitimate users even more so than the bad guys, and an amateur’s grasp and deployment of single sign on has been noted to either blow open a mile-wide vulnerability or actually do the exact opposite of what SSO is supposed to do. This is why companies need to trust a firm that’s designed specifically to handle it.

To combat the vulnerabilities that are exposed by the overuse of third-party operational companies with ties to manufacturer databases, many managers are turning to the assistance of OneLogin to secure client and employee identities with competent, industry-leading single sign on and MFA technologies. This is an all-important step in reestablishing customer trust, but more importantly, it takes old tricks and applies them in essentially new ways to prevent identity theft and financial catastrophes from unfolding down the road while making the login process seamless for real users behind the accounts they’re trying to access. OneLogin’s combination of these two technologies shows promise of a world without worry — for now.

Their multifactor authentication isn’t anything particular on its own, and it comes with the standard bells and whistles that one would expect:

• SMS one-time passwords (OTPs)

• Security questions

• Hardware certificates

• Good ol’ login credentials

• Location-based login recordings

• Biometrics

The idea here is to triangulate a series of conditions that only the legitimate user can meet. It’s highly unlikely that a hacker will happen to have the actual device, phone number, biometric information, knowledge for the security questions, live in the same general location and also happen to know the login details simultaneously. This is where SSO steps in and makes it super easy for anyone who’s passed all of these conditions to login without needing to input a password. This allows employees to access their accounts without wasting precious time on the same authentication rigmarole every time.

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