Security News > 2022 > July > SMBs are behind in adopting multi-factor authentication

A report released Tuesday by the Cyber Readiness Institute looks at the slow state of MFA adoption among SMBs. CRI surveyed 1,403 small business owners across the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Japan, India, Germany, Canada and Australia from May 2 to May 15.

Among the respondents, 55% admitted that they're not very aware of MFA and its security benefits, while 54% said they haven't adopted MFA for their business.

Some 30% said that they have general cybersecurity policies, but those policies don't mention MFA, 27% said that their policies mention MFA but don't require it and 15% revealed that they have no security policies at all.

Though challenges do exist, Warner says MFA is a "Relatively low-effort step" for SMBs and one that can achieve huge security benefits.

"MFA should be used to make authenticating more efficient, reducing the need for users to type in their passwords or even the need to create new passwords," said Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at security firm Delinea.

"A strong privileged access management solution can help reduce risk by adding additional security controls to sensitive privileged accounts along with MFA and continuous verification. Combining MFA with PAM also further improves security by moving security controls to being risk based and adaptive to the business."

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/smbs-behind-adopting-mfa/