Study Reveals Security Concerns over Convergence of Personal, Workplace Identities

Gemalto released the findings of its Authentication and Identity Management Index, which revealed that 90% of enterprise IT professionals are concerned that employee reuse of personal credentials for work purposes could compromise security.
 
However, with two-thirds (68%) saying they would be comfortable allowing employees to use their social media credentials on company resources, Gemalto’s research suggests that personal applications (such as email) are the biggest worry to organizations.
 
The enterprise and consumer worlds are merging closer together, with enterprise security teams under increasing pressure to implement the same type of authentication methods typically seen in consumer services, such as fingerprint scanning and iris recognition. Six in ten (62%) believed this was the case, with a similar amount (63%) revealing they feel security methods designed for consumers provide sufficient protection for enterprises.
 
Identity theft accounts for 64% of all data breaches across the globe, and consumer service breaches continue to rise, resulting in almost nine in ten (89%) enterprises addressing their access management security policies.
 
Enterprises are clearly seeing the benefits, with over nine in ten (94%) using two-factor authentication to protect at least one application and nearly all respondents (96%) expecting to use it at some point in the future.
 
Despite an increasing amount of businesses enabling mobile working, a third (35%) completely restricted employees from accessing company resources via mobile devices and nine in ten (91%) are at least part-restricting access to resources. This is backed up as half of businesses (50%) admit security is one of their biggest concerns to increasing user mobility.
 
In order to protect themselves against threats from increased mobility, enterprises are still most likely to be using usernames and passwords – two thirds of users at respondents’ organizations are using this authentication method, on average. Currently, 37% of users at respondents’ organizations are required to use two-factor authentication to access corporate resources from mobile devices, on average.