User Authentication Study

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A new benchmark study conducted by Aberdeen Group, Strong User Authentication, shows that 52 percent of organizations require only passwords for employees to access critical data, rather than augmenting passwords with stronger forms of authentication such as hardware tokens, digital certificates or risk-based scoring. Nearly 150 organizations from a diverse set of global industries were polled for the study underwritten by Quest Software, Inc.

Other findings of the Aberdeen benchmark study include:

• 88 percent of enterprise users have multiple work-related passwords, averaging between five and six.
• 64 percent of organizations do not even require users to change their passwords.
• 45 percent of organizations allow standard dictionary terms (like “password”).
• 29 percent of organizations have no requirements for password length.

“With the recent, well-publicized incidents of network and identity theft, companies need to put security first and require more than just passwords for user authentication,” says Jackson Shaw, senior director of product management for Quest Software. “Helping our customers increase security and mitigate the risk associated with compromised confidential information has become a top priority at Quest. As a result, Quest offers solutions for two-factor authentication as well as single sign-on, provisioning, password management, role management, auditing and compliance reporting.”

To download the entire Aberdeen Group report, Strong User Authentication: Best-in-Class Performance at Assuring Identities, click here.