CIO eGuide: Preventing Data Breaches

Executive Summary

Data is becoming increasingly important in business. As a result, more and more organizations are becoming attractive targets for hackers. Data breaches caused by stolen credentials are on the rise. You need smarter tools to protect your organization against the monetary and reputational damage caused by a data breach. This guide will explain how Okta Adaptive Multifactor Authentication (MFA) provides the security that IT needs, while also providing the simplicity end users want.

The Challenge of Authentication Security

IT and security professionals have long known that multifactor authentication is an effective way to secure critical applications and infrastructure against unauthorized access. The challenges are that managing MFA products is expensive for IT, and repeatedly entering passcodes is frustrating for end users. As a result, many organizations have been deterred from deploying MFA beyond a select group of IT and privileged users.

Every time your organization launches a new application or product, securing it with MFA requires a timeconsuming integration project. Many organizations struggle to keep track of which apps and infrastructure are secured with MFA, creating security holes and coverage gaps that put the organization at risk. In addition, both IT and end users are familiar with the shortcomings of the hardware tokens that many traditional MFA solutions use for verification. These tokens are time-consuming to manage, easy to lose, and expensive to replace.

In an effort to provide a less irritating user experience, some organizations have tried security questions as a less-burdensome alternative. However, social networks and social engineering have made it easy to find the answers to many common security questions. As a result, security questions are not typically secure enough for sensitive applications. These questions are not necessarily easier