As the physical and virtual demands of our workspace continually evolve and security challenges become increasingly complex, the importance surrounding intuitive, yet watertight identity security has never been higher.
In this blog, we’re taking a closer look at Yubico; the creators of the YubiKey and their mission to create the strongest form of authentication.
Protecting Your Online Identity
Founded in 2007, Yubico is a Swedish born company will a sole aim to create a safer online experience for all. The answer was a hardware key; the YubiKey, that can prove the user is physically present when attempting to login to their personal and corporate accounts – therefore eliminating the possibility of remote account takeovers.
It’s a simple concept – after all, we use keys to let ourselves into our homes, our cars, our offices, so why not our virtual world too?
However, with the constantly changing threats and varying country standards technology must work to, Yubico needed to think and build ahead of the curve as part of their product development and evolution. Teaming up with Google, Microsoft and other leading internet companies, Yubico were able to create the pioneering design of the first one-time password, FIDO Universal 2nd Factor and FIDO open authentication standards; in addition to additional security factors built into the PIV smart card such as touch-to-sign features and built-in verification.
What Does This Mean for Businesses?
Thanks to the easy to use and understand product and an innovative development team within Yubico, organisations that have adopted YubiKeys as their authentication tool of choice are benefiting from an increase in employee productivity as a result of the easy login flows, reduced support requests aimed at helpdesks and of course heightened security.
In fact, after a 2-year study by Yubico customers Google, they found that login times for their own teams were nearly four times faster when comparing the YubiKey to Google Authenticator and so decided to roll out YubiKeys to over 85,000 of its employees as a result. Since the roll-out of YubiKeys in 2017, the company has experienced zero account takeovers or breaches by phishing.
We know from experience and research that a successful security solution must not only be a watertight and steadfast product, but it must be an easily adopted solution too. If not, employees and users will find ways to bypass the solution opening the company up to just as much risk exposure; if not more, than before.
Implementation
The main reason our customers love YubiKeys is the simple rollout of any order combined with the ability for your organisation to ‘go passwordless’.
With minimum order numbers starting from just 10 keys and an incredibly easy set-up, your employees can be protected within days across a variety of applications. It can also be used as part of a layer of solutions such as Microsoft or access management tools including Okta to create the passwordless environment all businesses are striving for.
If you have teams working with private and sensitive information or experience breach attempts, or struggle with regular password reset requests via helpdesks, Yubico may hold the key to your solution (like what we did there?).
Speak with our workspace team to find out more about the technologies available to you today via Distology.