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Subjects: Contract/Agreement, Survey

Secret Double Octopus and Ponemon US Study Finds Remote Work Driving Passwordless with 66% Planning Adoption Over the Next 2 Years


Secret Double Octopus, in partnership with the Ponemon Institute, announced today the results of a US-based study focused on understanding the state of workforce passwordless authentication, from motivational drivers to results after transitioning to its use. Results demonstrated that remote work has and will continue driving adoption of workforce passwordless authentication. In addition, using survey responses the cost of economic efficiencies from the use of passwordless technologies was calculated and suggests cost savings of $1.9M over conventional password-based MFA.

"Enterprises continue to feel threatened in the pandemic with many feeling targeted, and this along with remote work and associated loss of productivity from password problems is driving increased adoption of passwordless technologies," said Dr Larry Ponemon. "Going forward organizations are extremely bullish on adopting passwordless authentication."

Key survey findings also revealed:

Remote Workforce Reportedly Felt Increased Security Risk Despite Broad Use of MFA

The study highlights that most organizations are using MFA in some way, with 60% reporting some use, but key areas such as servers, VPN, legacy software, mobile applications and virtualization all have MFA in use at less than 40% of respondents' environments.

The study highlights that organizations feel that the impact of remote work is reducing security posture. Cloud infrastructure and services are deemed the highest area of risk with 60% of organizations feeling remote work makes for less secure cloud infrastructure despite being the resource they are most protecting with MFA (53% of organizations indicated MFA use for cloud services).

Traditional Password Authentication Significantly More Expensive

To estimate the total amount of economic loss from traditional password-based authentication versus passwordless, Double Octopus and Ponemon asked organizations to detail the costs attributed to a range of costs, including direct IT costs, downtime, lost business, damaged reputation and paid ransomware.

Over the 2-year period,

"Many organizations may feel they are doing the most expedient thing for securing their organizations by rolling out more conventional MFA," said Horacio Zambrano, Chief Marketing Officer of Secret Double Octopus. "But the data clearly show there is an enormous amount of lost productivity per employee and financial risk by not removing the link between the password and the employee."

Recommendations for the Enterprise:

To reach the goals of better security and increased productivity, organizations must:

The State of Workforce Passwordless Authentication 2021 report, with its full insights, can be downloaded here. Additionally, Secret Double Octopus will host a webinar with Dr Larry Ponemon to discuss the findings of the report and the implications for the market at large on November 11th at 10AM PST. To join the event, please register here.

About Secret Double Octopus

Secret Double Octopus is the global leader in next generation workforce authentication solutions. It's industry-leading Octopus platform offers mid-market to Fortune 100 enterprises the ability to move to a higher security, frictionless and unified authentication platform for MFA and passwordless authentication. From leveraging existing MFA authenticators to supporting legacy on premise applications, no other desktop MFA and enterprise passwordless platform offers as much robustness and flexibility as the Octopus solution. The company has been designated a Gartner "Cool Vendor" and more recently named "Best-in-Class" passwordless solution by AITE Group in 2021. Learn more at https://doubleoctopus.com/.



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