{"id":4213,"date":"2013-10-10T07:00:51","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T15:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/?p=4213"},"modified":"2013-11-12T02:25:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-12T10:25:14","slug":"security-multi-factor-authentication-replacing-standard-passwords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/security-multi-factor-authentication-replacing-standard-passwords\/","title":{"rendered":"Security: Multi-Factor Authentication Replacing Standard Passwords"},"content":{"rendered":"

Security is by far the number one concern that most businesses cite when considering a move of any of their data to the cloud. To counter these concerns, cloud vendors are doing all they can to improve security. For example, vendors certifying cloud data centers for SAS 70 compliant, encrypting all web pages and service interactions with SSL, and performing frequent security audits.<\/p>\n

But despite these many attempts to improve cloud security, what’s often the achilles heel<\/a> for cloud security are user passwords. Passwords can often be easily guessed or broken, allowing unauthorized access to cloud services. Increasingly alternative, more secure methods than simple passwords are being adopted by vendors.<\/div>\n
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Heather Adkins<\/a>, Google’s manager of information security, went so far as to say that <\/a>“passwords are dead.”<\/div>\n
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Cloud vendors are increasingly adopting a more robust kind of identification that requires a second level of validation besides just knowing the password. The technology is called ‘two factor authentication’, or more generally, ‘multi-factor authentication’<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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There are three categories of authentication elements:<\/div>\n
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