Businesses are actively moving to eradicate passwords from employees’ lives, with almost nine in 10 IT leaders expecting passwords to represent less than a quarter of their organisation’s logins within five years or less.
That’s according to the 2023 Workforce Authentication Report by the FIDO Alliance and LastPass which delves into the attitudes and strategies of IT decision-makers.
The report reveals that 92 per cent of businesses plan to move to passwordless technology while 95 per cent currently use a passwordless experience at their organisation.
The main barrier to passwordless adoption is education: 55 per cent of IT leaders feel they need more education on how the technology works and/or how to deploy it.
“The move towards passwordless authentication has gained steam over the past few years as an increasing number of organisations have moved to eliminate the risk and liability of passwords as they are the source of the vast majority of data breaches,” said Andrew Shikiar, executive director and CMO of the FIDO Alliance.
“This report backs up this trend by illustrating that global IT leaders are rapidly aiming to reduce their reliance on legacy forms of authentication in favor of passkeys for user-friendly, phishing-resistant sign-ins.”
Other findings
A majority of businesses are still using phishable authentication methods, such as passwords (76 per cent) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) (43 per cent) when it comes to authenticating users within their organisation.
Ninety-two per cent of IT leaders believe passkeys will benefit their overall security posture; and 93 per cent of IT leaders agree that passkeys will eventually help reduce the volume of unofficial (Shadow IT) applications.
Half of IT leaders believe that passwordless authentication will reduce the need for nonpasswordless MFA offerings; 56 per cent believe it will also result in a reduction in IT help desk requests.
