Coronavirus: Idaptive Boosts MFA Approach To Work-From-Home

‘What we’re working on right now is trying to establish some sort of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) so you can use a second factor, such as a phone, text message, email, something of that nature to truly prove your identity, so we make sure we’re only letting the correct actors into that application versus some hacker,’ Idaptive’s Brian Krause tells CRN.

As companies across the country require their employees to work-from-home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many are faced with the challenge of finding effective ways to work remotely, while also maintaining a zero-trust approach to security.

“Right now companies are sending their workforces home and they’re doing it in mass. So they’re running into a very real problem of saying, ‘Hey, how do I actually give access to all of my applications, so my workers can productively work-from-home and do this quickly, but more importantly, also do it in a secure manner?” Idaptive’s Director of Worldwide Channels Brian Krause told CRN.

The Santa Clara-based security vendor, a provider of solutions for identity and access management, is doing just that by enabling customers to intelligently verify and validate people, devices and services. Kruase spoke with CRN about how Idaptive is tackling this crisis.'

How are you ensuring the safety of not only your customers but your partners?

“When we look at that where a lot of the safety comes in is most people can put a lot of critical apps into the cloud; I mean it’s pretty common, [Microsoft] Office 365, Salesforce and Box, things of that nature. But the only way you can protect who is accessing, generally, is with a username and password. That is your identity telling the world of machines who you are as a person. So what we’re working on right now is trying to establish some sort of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) so you can use a second factor, such as a phone, text message, email, something of that nature to truly prove your identity, so we make sure we’re only letting the correct actors into that application versus some hacker.”

How has it been with the scale, the magnitude of helping everyone individually have these systems in place?

“Well, it’s actually been a very weird challenge in the sense that we’ve never seen this many people try to put new users remote. So, we really had to look at it in a three-step process of saying, ‘What can I do to immediately help the need today?’ A lot of this happened last Friday, where all of a sudden a company said, ‘I’m sending everybody home.’ Okay, great let’s send them home, ‘Now what?’ Well, the ‘Now what?’ is let’s just get a basic MFA put in place, something that says — for a bunch of different apps, for the VPN — ‘Let’s have one technology. Then from there we got to come in and say, ‘How do we make it better?’ Well, this is where we start consolidating some of these identities stored and instead of having multiple usernames and passwords, bring it down to one. So, there’s some sort of single sign-on and then from there, ‘How do we make this system work very well, make it good, so it kind of works on more of an autonomous basis and I can easily add and remove users on whim.”

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