Security News > 2020 > August > Security in the 'new normal': Passwordless is the way forward
"The better way to protect the user is to provide a more intuitive, more friendly experience and a more secure way through passwordless," Chik says.
Remote working is a core scenario for Microsoft customers in enterprise, government and education for the rest of this calendar year, the next 12 months and likely beyond, Chik notes: "71% of employees and managers want to continue to work from home, especially when we don't have COVID vaccination, but even in a post-pandemic world, people want the flexibility of being able to work from home." That's helping to put security, identity and MFA in the top five investment areas for security leaders, although CISOs need to improve security for remote workers without reducing their productivity.
That's helped MFA usage by Microsoft's commercial customers increase by over 25%. "We started in the low single digits, and now it's in the double digits - it's not where we want to be, but the good news is that MFA is turned on by default for all the new tenants created in Azure A," he says.
More sophisticated customers will still use conditional access policies and the very few organisations that have opted out of Security Defaults on a new tenant have done it to turn on conditional access.
"We'll continue to push on that button, but by embracing passwordless with MFA support, we can increase the security posture by 99.9%.".