The TruU Hub

Is Windows Hello Enough for Enterprise Passwordless Access?

Organizations are rethinking their workplaces and options for their workforces. Companies in regulated industries and those with higher security needs where work once occurred only in fully-trusted facilities now need to support work anywhere in the world, on any type of device securely. The disintegration of the enterprise perimeter suddenly got more pronounced and very apparent as organizations scrambled to support a geographically dispersed workforce with the need to support the most varied locations.

Passwordless authentication has been employed for customer identity for many years and is now seeing growing interest from financial institutions for their employees and partners. Anti-money laundering (AML) laws and KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance drove interest in anti-fraud/money laundering customer identity first, but the adoption of newer authentication methods such as biometrics and behavioral biometrics, and more recently the use of identity proofing technology is just as applicable for the workforce.

What is passwordless authentication in 2020, where biometrics are quickly becoming a mainstream technology and AIML (artificial intelligence / machine learning) approaches are on the horizon? In this article we explore the passwordless authentication fully from a generic perspective (not specific to an enterprise or consumer use case), and provide a view of where the market stands today and what it will take to be successful in the future.