5 Tips To Find the Best Two Factor Authentication Provider for Your Business
Five tips on how to choose the best multifactor authentication among dozens of MFA solutions on the market
Cybercriminals don’t care if your business is a small local affair or a huge global enterprise. They target businesses of all sizes. If a hacker gets access to your admin account, they can do whatever they want with your data. And with the data of your users and customers.
If you don’t want to put yours and your customers’ credentials, financial records, documents in jeopardy you have to add multiple-factor authentication to every point of access to your business. It is the only solid way to put an extra barrier between your invaluable data and the cybercriminals.
In this post, we will offer you 5 tips on how to choose the best multifactor authentication among dozens of MFA solutions on the market.
1. To protect each vulnerable area in one shot, look for an MFA solution compatible with all the software in your environment
Chances are, you’ll have to protect more than one area with 2-step verification. Your admins’ accounts, employees’ accounts, accounts of the end-users. Integrating each area with a different solution might take years and immeasurable effort on your admins’ part.
Just consider this. If you need to protect your website users, your 2-way authentication solution will need an API integration option. To protect your employees’ computers with 2FA you’ll need it to be compatible with Windows, Ubuntu, and/or macOS. You may also need to protect the Windows server connection via RDP and the OWA accounts. Now imagine how much money, time, and effort you’ll need to secure every area separately.
To avoid draining your resources your 2FA choice should be easy to integrate with different software. You need a solution that will fit all your vulnerable areas seamlessly.
2. Choose a provider that supports all the possible OTP tokens. And allows the use of different tokens for different users.
A hardware token is the most reliable multi-factor authentication method. But ordering a hardware OTP token for each and every employee can be quite expensive. Plus some people might prefer to use their own devices as a method of dual authentication. An MFA app or a chat-bot OTP delivery might be a better choice for them.
Segmenting your users into different groups and securing their accounts with different methods is more efficient. You can provide a hardware security token for every system administrator. And those employees that have access to the most valuable data. And the rest of your users can have a voice between a two-factor authentication app and chat bots. This way you’ll provide your users with the freedom of choice and save a little.
For this scheme to work you’ll need a 2-factor authentication service that supports various OTP delivery methods. And allows for different user groups to use different types of MFA tokens.
| Read also: The Pros and Cons of Different Two-Factor Authentication Types and Methods
3. Look for the adaptive authentication and user self-service features
Technology is meant to make our lives easier, not harder. Some multi-factor authentication vendors offer features that will make two-factor auth more enjoyable for the end-users and the admins. These features are adaptive authentication and user self-service.
Adaptive authentication
This feature makes MFA security as user-friendly as it can possibly be. The feature allows the system to assess the possibility of a breach every time a user logs in. The authorization will act according to the predefined rules applied to the user group.
The adaptive authentication feature analyzes a user’s environment. Things like the browser they use to access the account, the user’s operating system and language, the presence or absence of various plugins and Java, even the color depth. Only if the predefined mismatch threshold is exceeded the system will ask for an OTP. So if the user logins from the same device every day they won’t have to type the OTP every time they do it.
The system builds a database of safe environments and profiles to compare against. So the longer the feature is used the more precise it becomes.
Read more about adaptive authentication here.
User self-service
The self-service feature was created to take the burden off the system admins’ shoulders. It will save them a lot of time. And the company — a bit of money.
With user self-service, the end-users can independently do a number of actions connected with issuing and managing their own 2-factor authentication tokens. And they can manage some of their data, like their login credentials and PINs, without the admins’ help. The extent to which the users can change the data and manage the tokens is determined by the system administrator.
Read more about user self-service feature here.
4. Pay attention to the customer support service work
We strongly believe that any business is as good as their customer service. If their customer support doesn’t answer promptly and generally lacks, setting up multi-factor authentication can become a nightmare.
You can see how good an MFA technology provider’s support service is right from the start, on the testing stage. The best providers can set up their solutions remotely for you. While others take days to reply to a request. It might sound strange, but there are some MFA solution providers that won’t even start discussing their price and features without a signed NDA.
We recommend going for the providers that reply promptly to any request. And are ready to go the extra mile to help with installing their solution and setting it up.
| Read also: 2FA Security Flaws You Should Know About
5. Find the best price-quality ratio
The highest price doesn’t always mean the best quality. Unfortunately, the market is still full of old multi-factor authentication solutions which ask a lot of money for supporting even each in-app token.
Good news is that there are plenty of good providers that offer support for 2FA token apps and TOTP delivery via chat bots in various messengers free of charge. We recommend working only with such MFA security solutions.
And while we are on the price-quality ratio here’s an advice — don’t go for the SMS 2FA. It’s too expensive and not secure enough.
