These days, we need passwords for everything. Though they are supposed to make our lives more secure, they’re driving us all crazy with the number of them we have to remember. With advances in biometrics, along with multi factor authentication (MFA), tokenization and the FIDO Alliance gaining popularity, the end of the password is in sight.

Password Usage as a Data Protection Strategy

Password usage is still one of the main data protection strategies implemented by companies. In fact, 70% of organizations still utilize a password-focused authentication approach. Given that the password still reigns supreme, a whopping 60% of IT service desk issues raised, are password related. It's no wonder, with the average employee having to deal with almost 200 credentials, how can one keep track of them all?

Not only that, but because people are developing a serious case of password fatigue, they’re starting to get sloppy when creating usernames and passwords. This poses a major cybersecurity risk, by making it easy for hackers and ransomware attacks to flourish. To put it in perspective, 80% of data breaches are connected to passwords, with 50% of phishing attacks resulting in success. Next to this, IT help desk incidents come with an average repair cost of $70, meaning password related issues don’t come cheap.

Time for a Passwordless Future

It's time to seriously rethink our current belief that passwords are enough protection against cybersecurity threats. As we’ve seen time and time again, they aren’t. We clearly have a problem with passwords as a society, and now we actually have the ability to fix it. However, despite advancements in password alternatives like biometric authentication and single sign on (SSO), many companies are still trapped in password hell because of their dependency on legacy hardware systems, applications and mainframes which are password bound.

Before now, we didn't really have a way to eliminate passwords from apps and websites, but all that is starting to change: the end of this password filled abyss is in sight. While it’s very likely we will have to use passwords to some extent for the next few years as we transition away from legacy software, with more companies switching to frameworks which eliminate traditional password usage, like FIDO2, a passwordless future is in sight.

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