
By Byron V. Acohido
Doing authentication well is vital for any company in the throes of digital transformation.
Digital commerce would fly apart if businesses could not reliably affirm the identities of all humans and all machines, that is, computing instances, that are constantly connecting to each other across the Internet.
Related: Locking down ‘machine identities’
At the moment, companies are being confronted with a two-pronged friction challenge, when it comes to authentication. On the one hand, they’re encountering crippling friction when attempting to migrate legacy, on-premises systems to the cloud. And on the other hand, there’s no authentication to speak of – when there needs to be some — when it comes to machine-to-machine connections happening on the fly to make digital processes possible.
I had an enlightening discussion about this with Dana Tamir, vice president of market strategy for Silverfort, a Tel Aviv-based supplier of agentless multi-factor authentication technology. We spoke at RSA 2020. For a full drill down of the interview, please listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are excerpts, edited for clarity and length:
LW: Can you frame the authentication challenge companies face today?
Tamir: One of the biggest changes taking place is that there are many more remote users, many more employees bringing their own devices, and many more cloud resources are being used. This has basically dissolved the network perimeter. You can’t assume trust within the perimeter because the perimeter doesn’t exist anymore.
And yet we know that threats exist everywhere, within our own environments, and out in the cloud. So that changes the way security needs to be applied, and how we authenticate our users. We now need to authenticate users everywhere, not only when they enter the network.
LW: What obstacles are companies running into with cloud migration?