Gemalto - Businesses under pressure - Employees want same simple access to cloud applications as consumers

New research from Gemalto has  led to nearly two-thirds (64%) of IT leaders admitting that their security teams are considering implementing consumer-grade access to cloud services for employees.

Surveying more than 1,000 IT decision makers globally, Gemalto’s 2018 Identity and Access Management Index revealed that the majority (54%) believe that the authentication methods they implement in their businesses are not as good compared to those found on popular sites including Amazon and Facebook.

With a growing number of cloud apps in use, more employees working remotely and pressure mounting to make authentication stronger while ensuring ease of use, IT decision makers are keen to ‘consumerize’ the login process. In fact, 52% percent of IT professionals believe that authentication methods applied in the consumer world can be applied secure access to enterprise resources.

51% of IT leaders expressed concern about employees reusing personal credentials for work.  At the same time, there seems to be increasing recognition that new approaches to cloud access can contribute to alleviating these issues.

55% of respondents believe that cloud access management can help simplify the login process for users, while 63% stated that a strong consideration for implementing a cloud access solution is the desire to reduce the threat of large scale breaches.

The fact that 58% of respondents also stated that inefficient cloud identity management would be a key factor in adopting a cloud access management solution, shows that scalability and management overheads are also of high concern to IT professionals.

With the growth in remote working, the cloud and secure access to applications have become important for organizations. As a result, almost all (94%) respondents believe that cloud access management is integral to adopting cloud applications.

In fact, nine in 10 also feel that ineffective cloud access management can lead to issues for their company, such as security (52%), IT staff’s time being used less efficiently (39%) and increased operational overheads and IT costs (38%). Despite this focus on protecting cloud applications, just three of the 27 used on average^<1> by organizations are protected with two-factor authentication.