The First Enterprise-Ready, End-to-End Biometric Authentication for the Microsoft Ecosystem

Balance Trust and Agility With Good Authentication Choices for Workforce Local Access

• Anmol Singh
• 1 April 2016

Organizations struggle to choose appropriate authentication methods that deliver the necessary balance of trust and agility for local workforce use cases. IAM and security leaders should use this research to evaluate various cost-effective authentication options available for workforce local access.

Key Challenges

• More than 50% of organizations are unable to extend incumbent authentication methods to support their expanding digital workplace requirements – including access for an increasingly mobile workforce.
• No single authentication method can address the varied trust requirements associated with several local workplace use cases – including access to virtualized desktop and BYOPC environments.
• While Windows 10 introduces native support for integrating biometric authentication methods, significant barriers to adoption remain, as users require specialized hardware components, such as depth-sensing infrared cameras for face and iris recognition.

Recommendations

IAM and security leaders should:

• Choose authentication methods that respect user experience and budget limitations, meet internal assurance and accountability requirements, and offer agility in a rapidly changing local workplace environment.
• Confront the diversity of local access use cases facing the organization by delivering a suitably broad range of authentication methods, offering the flexibility to address the varied requirements of such use cases.
• Advocate for an upgrade to Windows 10 for enabling a more consistent use of biometric authentication methods across the variety of local access profiles backed by a readiness assessment of all kinds of endpoint devices.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2020, 60% of organizations pursuing digital workplace strategies will adopt contextual authentication and adaptive access for improved UX, up from less than 5% today. By 2019, 40% of organizations will use Windows Hello for Windows 10 login, allowing them to enable consistent authentication methods across the variety of endpoint devices and use cases.

Introduction

This document was revised on 4 April 2016. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

Organizations must choose and enforce the use of risk-appropriate authentication methods to prevent unauthorized access to local networks, systems and applications, as well as to comply with appropriate regulatory standards. But as digital business allows an organization to advance new interactions, an enterprise's selection of authentication methods becomes influenced by alternate needs. Leaders often work to shape authentication methods to serve user preferences. Workplace trends and technology options also draw attention to how workers engage the technology they use to do their jobs. While maintaining such diverse priorities, organizations struggle to choose authentication methods that not only respect these constraints, but also provide the necessary balance of trust and workforce agility at a justifiable cost.

The consumerization of workplace computing tools is forcing security leaders to restructure their efforts to offer protection against the heightened risks without degrading the user experience (UX) objectives of a digital workplace. Traditional authentication methods, such as legacy password and X.509 smart cards, are no longer viable authentication choices for an employee-friendly workspace that uses "anywhere, anytime" computing models. In this research, Gartner identifies the challenges that organizations face to deliver secure enterprise applications and workspaces to internal employees, contractors and business partners. We also provide best-practice recommendations for good authentication choices that balance, across a heterogeneous environment, the ranging assurance and accountability needs with usability and other UX goals.

Analysis

Evaluate Trust and Accountability When Choosing Authentication Methods

As digital business grows in adoption and competitive significance, identity and access management (IAM) and security leaders need to support a growing number of workforce local access use cases that provide and control access via corporate networks.