Biometric authentication sees increase in adoption during the pandemic
A new report confirms that enterprises are taking steps to move away from passwords and adopting other authentication methods to protect the hybrid workforce. The 2021 Duo Trusted Access Report, released by Cisco's Duo Security, found that while the total number of Duo MFA authentications increased 39% in the past year, biometric authentications grew even faster at 48%. The report analyzed data from more than 36 million devices, over 400,000 applications and roughly 800 million monthly authentications across Duo’s global users.
Biometrics were enabled on more than 71% of Duo customer mobile phones, which the report suggests could be illustrative of a rise in adoption driven by users’ growing acceptance of non-traditional authentication methods and the accessibility of passwordless hardware. The study also saw a fivefold increase in Web Authentication (WebAuthn) usage, which enables biometrics to be securely stored and validated locally, since April 2019 when the World Wide Web Consortium first published the open standard.