Mobile IDs, multifactor authentication and sustainability emerged as the Top 3 trends in the security industry this year, a report from HID shows.
The report is based on a survey — conducted in the autumn of 2023 — of 2,600 partners, end users, and security and IT personnel worldwide, across a range of job titles and organisation sizes representing over 11 industries.
Results point to six themes, with the first being that mobile identity is expected to be ubiquitous in the next five years, given the widespread use of mobile devices.
Within the next five years, surveyed end users state that nearly 80% of organisations will deploy mobile IDs.
Industry partners are even more optimistic in their outlook, stating that 94% of their customers will have deployed mobile IDs.
Second, MFA is widespread, despite slow but growing implementation of Zero Trust. More than 83% of end users respondents said their organisation currently uses MFA, mainly due to the vulnerabilities of passwords.
For many, this represents the first step on the longer journey toward Zero Trust, an approach to security that calls for organisations to maintain strict access controls and to never trust, always verify anyone – internal or external – by default.
Zero Trust has been implemented in 16% of organisations with over 100,000 employees and 14% in those with up to 10,000 employees, according to the survey.
With MFA being widespread, the eventual end of passwords is imminent. The creation of new standards such as FIDO (Fast Identity Online) which uses “standard public key cryptography techniques to provide phishing-resistant authentication” will pave the path to new and more secure authentication options which will be part of a more robust Zero Trust architecture.
Third, sustainability is becoming a growing driver in business decisions. Among HID’s survey respondents, sustainability continues to rank high as a business priority, with both end users and partners rating its importance at a “4” on a 1-to-5 scale.
Additionally, 74% of end users indicate the importance of sustainability has grown over the past year, and 80% of partners reported the trend growing in importance among their customers.
Fourth, biometrics continues its impressive momentum as 39% of installers and integrators said their customers are using fingerprint or palm print, and 30% said they’re using facial recognition.
The momentum continues to build as 8% plan to test or implement some form of biometrics in the next year and 12% plan to do so in the next three to five years.
Fifth, identity management points up to the cloud as nearly half of end users are moving to cloud-based identity management, with 24% already using it and another 24% in the process of implementing such systems.
Industry partners say their customers face several hurdles here, including existing reliance on legacy/on-premise equipment (28%), lack of budget (24%), and cloud-based identities simply not being a business priority (21%).
Finally, findings show the rise of AI for analytics use cases. Talks about AI have come to dominate the business landscape, and many security professionals see AI’s analytic capabilities as the low-hanging fruit to enhance identity management.
Rather than looking to AI to inform the entirety of the security system, it’s possible to leverage data analytics as a way to operationalise AI in support of immediate outcomes. In this scenario, 35% of end users reported they will be testing or implementing some AI capability in the next three to five years, with 15% already using AI-enabled biometrics.
“The increasing digitisation of society and business has created concerns over security and privacy which are also driving innovations in security at the same time, such as the increasing adoption of mobile IDs across multiple sectors in Southeast Asia,” said Prabhuraj Patil, HID commercial director for physical access control solutions in ASEAN and India subcontinent.
