In the pursuit of collective and continuous improvement, the survey revealed five topics as the most pressing facing the industry.

Supply chain issues

Supply chain issues continue to be a concerning factor for industry professionals with 74% of respondents saying they were impacted by supply chain issues in 2022. There is some positivity however with 50% saying they were optimistic that conditions will improve in 2023. More than two-thirds of organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees said that they were highly impacted by supply chain issues in 2022, but they were also the most optimistic that these issues will resolve in 2023, according to the report.

Sustainability

According to the report, nearly 90% of respondents said sustainability was an important issue. End-users are increasingly demanding that suppliers provide footprint transparency in terms of their operations, product sourcing and research and development practices, with 87% of respondents stating sustainability ranks as “important to extremely important.” Mirroring this trend, 76% said they have seen the importance of sustainability increasing for their customers.

To support this growing demand, security teams are leveraging the cloud and the Internet of Things, even more, to optimize processes and reduce resources. Additionally, new products and solutions are being developed to address sensible energy usage, waste reduction and resource optimization.

Hybrid Work Environments

With hybrid work environments becoming the new normal in the industry means Identity as a ervice (IDaaS) is quickly becoming the expectation. Digital transformation and the convergence of physical and logical access caused enterprises to migrate more of their access management capabilities to the cloud and with 81% of respondents saying they offer a hybrid work model, it seems more companies will deliver identity management “as a service” rather than via on-premises infrastructure in 2023. With this shift, more and more security teams are rethinking access strategies.

The survey revealed 67% of respondents said multifactor authentication (MFA) and passwordless authentication are most important to adapting to hybrid and remote work, while 48% say mobile and digital IDs are important. Additionally, 39% point out that data strategy, framework and tools are required components to this evolving work environment.

Digital ID Adoption

The recent survey shows the acceleration of digital wallet adoption is expanding beyond just payments, including employee badges, drivers’ licenses, national IDs and passports. According to the survey, 47% of integrators and installers indicate their customers are using mobile identities for identity verification.

Sustainability also plays a role in the digital adoption.

“In 2023 we’ll continue to see a push in digital,” Travis Hensley, Global Sustainability, Health and Safety Manager, at HID, said at Wednesday’s media briefing. “I don’t foresee a total phase out of physical access cards but more of an evolution. We’re always looking for ways of move toward improvement and reduce.”

Contactless biometrics

Biometric technologies represent a major break from more conventional means of access control. This means there will be many new opportunities to use only our fingerprints or faces when interacting with access technologies. Approximately 59% of survey respondents said they are currently using or plan to implement or at least test biometric technologies in the near future.