Mobile IDs and MFA dominate HID’s 2024 State of Security and Identity Report

The 2024 State of Security Report delves into the underlying concerns driving upcoming innovations and the technologies that underpin them, in turn helping security leaders to be proactive in adapting to evolving challenges. Conducted late last year, the new survey reveals six key themes.

Mobile identity is expected to be ubiquitous in the next five years

Given the widespread use of mobile devices, momentum continues to build around their use in support of identity. Within the next five years, surveyed end users state that nearly 80% of organisations will deploy mobile IDs. Industry partners are even more optimistic in their outlook, stating that 94% of their customers will have deployed mobile IDs.

Multi-Factor Authentication is widespread, despite the slow (but growing) implementation of Zero Trust

More than 83% of end user respondents said their organisation currently uses Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), mainly due to the vulnerabilities of passwords. For many, this represents the first step on the longer journey towards Zero Trust, itself an approach to security that calls for organisations to maintain strict access controls and to ‘never trust, always verify’ anyone – internal or external – by default.

According to HID’s survey results, Zero Trust has been implemented in 16% of those organisations surveyed with over 100,000 employees and 14% in those with up to 10,000 employees.

With MFA being widespread, the eventual end of the password is “imminent”. The creation of new standards such as Fast Identity Online (FIDO), which uses “standard public key cryptography techniques to provide phishing-resistant authentication,” will pave the path towards “new and more secure authentication options” as part of a more robust Zero Trust architecture.

Sustainability becomes a growing driver in business decisions 

Among HID’s survey respondents, sustainability continues to rank highly as a business priority, with both end users and partners rating its importance at a ‘4’ on a 1-to-5 scale. Additionally, 74% of end users indicate the importance of sustainability has grown over the past year, while 80% of partners report the trend growing in importance among their customers.

As such, there will likely be a continued emphasis on solutions that minimise energy use, reduce waste and optimise resource usage.

A shift to cloud-based solutions and the increased use of mobile devices are two clear strategies to reach these sustainability goals.

Biometrics continue an impressive momentum

In this year’s survey, 39% of installers and integrators said their customers are using fingerprint or palm print, while 30% stated that they’re using facial recognition. The momentum continues to build as 8% of survey respondents plan to test or otherwise implement some form of biometrics in the next year and 12% plan to do so in the next three-to-five years.

Identity management points up to the cloud 

Nearly half of end users are moving to cloud-based identity management, with 24% already using it and another 24% in the process of implementing such systems. Industry partners say their customers face several hurdles here, including existing reliance on legacy/’on-prem’ equipment (28%), a lack of budget (24%) and cloud-based identities simply not being a business priority (21%).

The rise of Artificial Intelligence for analytics use cases

Conversations about Artificial Intelligence (AI) have come to dominate the business landscape. Many security professionals view AI’s analytic capabilities as the low-hanging fruit to enhance identity management.

Rather than looking to AI to inform the entirety of the security system, it’s possible to leverage data analytics as a way that then ‘operationalises’ AI in support of immediate outcomes. In this scenario, 35% of end users reported that they will be testing or implementing some AI capability in the next three-to-five years, with 15% already using AI-enabled biometrics.

*Download copies of ‘The Industry Report: 2024 State of Security and Identity’

*Further information on HID Global and its solutions is available online at www.hidglobal.com