Cyber Defense eMagazine October Edition for 2021

Authenticator Choice Impacts That Crucial Last Mile of User Experience
Consumers and enterprise users are increasingly asserting choice and control as they grapple with
challenging new issues around privacy, consent, and digital identity. New identity paradigms are driving
the need for more and better choice. Examples include Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI) where an end
user's username and credentials are managed by a third party, and W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs) –
an open standard for tamper-evident digital credentials which represent information found in physical
credentials, such as a passport or license. Each further drives the need for more and better choice.
End users are also demanding that self-service management and choice of authentication methods be
available at their disposal from corporate IT. Furthermore, users strongly desire to use these preferred
authentication method across multiple use cases as they navigate across disparate systems such as
personal computers, mobile devices, corporate IT applications, and consumer applications. The
complexity of choice and resulting friction is further compounded as diverse user populations that span
internal, partner and external groups are considered. Each of these has their own entitlements and policy
driven rules.
Needed: A Modern Authentication Strategy That is Identity Provider Agnostic
Identity Providers (IdPs) are services that store and manage digital identities for enterprises and
consumers. The record growth in the proliferation of digital identities has propelled the global identity
and access management (IAM) market towards reaching $22.68 billion by 2025 with several vendors
consolidating and vying to capture the lion’s share of the customer’s wallet by bundling multiple products
from their portfolio. The widespread acceptance of Microsoft 365 has resulted in digital identities also
proliferating across Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) - Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access
management service with their own attributes and related services.
These diverging developments have forced a strategic shift in thinking within IAM groups which is away
from the historical goal of standardizing on a single IdP across the entire enterprise, to an acceptance
that there is likely to be coexistence at least for the foreseeable future amongst multiple IdPs – on prem,
hybrid and / or multi-cloud.
This has resulted in a new strategic driver to separate the authentication component from the IdP offered
services as part of developing a modern authentication strategy that simultaneously addresses multiple
stakeholders. The organization can more effectively manage the “last mile” of user experience agnostic
of the IdP’s MFA capabilities. It also levels the playing field enabling better competition between Identity
Providers IdPs and drives improved economic value for the organization.
Some Key Areas That a Modern Authentication System Must Address
User Centric Passwordless Authentication: A passwordless future is inevitable in response to the
endemic threat of credential exploits resulting in spread of data breaches and ransomware attacks.
Passwordless authentication methods improve cyber security while simultaneously reducing user friction
Cyber Defense eMagazine – October 2021 Edition 84
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