Without controlling cloud application access, organizations are at risk of a security breach. Attackers are relentless. They hunt, phish, scam, and social-engineer everybody including privileged users to infiltrate your organization. Once inside, they look for opportunities to elevate privilege and appropriate resources. Implementing 2FA software solutions across users thwarts attacks and protects corporate data.

How is 2FA More Secure?

An additional authentication factor prevents someone from signing into your account, even if they know your password. Although you may think your password is safe, it can be compromised in a number of ways: Most individuals choose an easy-to-remember password and reuse it for several applications – those who know you can easily guess a pet’s name, a birthplace or an important date; Someone looking over your shoulder can decipher your password; Finally, a more sophisticated technique that can compromise your login credentials is a key logger that records all keystrokes and sends them to a third party.

If authentication requires both a password and, say, a USB token with a digital certificate on it, a criminal would need to know your credentials and be in possession of your USB token in order to sign into your account. Without being in possession of both, any unauthorized access would fail and also trigger a security event to let the admin know of a suspicious login attempt.

Authentication can be made even stronger by combining additional factors to achieve multi-factor authentication (MFA); you can add a PKI certificate in your browser or prompt the user for additional secrets. Or you can use OneLogin Desktop to increase security via an on-laptop certificate that delivers a second factor of authentication in the form of a trusted device, in effect multi-factor authentication for all application access.

For even more security, consider adding Adaptive Authentication, which leverages machine learning to apply an extra layer of intelligence to protect identities.