Gartner Predicts Increased Adoption of Mobile-Centric Biometric Authentication and SaaS-Delivered IAM

Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner
Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner

By 2022, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 70 percent of organizations using biometric authentication for workforce access will implement it via smartphone apps, regardless of the endpoint device being used. In 2018, this figure was fewer than 5 percent.

Lower costs and improved user experience/customer experience (UX/CX) are fueling this increasing interest in biometric authentication.

“Security and risk management leaders responsible for identity and access management (IAM) and fraud prevention continue to seek approaches for identity corroboration that balance trust and accountability against total cost of ownership and UX/CX,” said Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner. “Biometric authentication uses biological or behavioral traits unique to each person and offers better UX/CX and accountability than other common methods. Implementing this via smartphone apps provides more consistency in UX/CX and is technically simpler than supporting it directly on a variety of different endpoint devices.”

Midsize and large organizations looking to implement biometric authentication via smartphone apps must be aware that biometric approaches that can be readily supported on any smartphone are vulnerable to presentation attacks or “spoofing” using photos, videos, voice recordings, and so on. Therefore, presentation attack detection or “liveness testing” is essential.

SaaS-Delivered IAM Will Fulfill Most Needs

Gartner predicts that, by 2022, 40 percent of global midsize and larger organizations will use IAM capabilities delivered as software as a service (SaaS) to fulfill most of their needs — up from 5 percent in 2018.

SaaS-delivered IAM is often deployed to enhance access management software implementations. The ease of implementation and rapid time to value of SaaS-delivered IAM offerings have proved valuable to organizations that favor SaaS adoption and do not consider the operational management of IAM functionality core to their business.

“Based on our client interactions, most SaaS-delivered IAM purchases are for access management and lightweight identity governance and administration functionality, such as single sign-on. These offerings provide excellent connectivity and include solid access management and password management features,” said Abhyuday Data, associate research principal analyst at Gartner. “B2B and B2C are the most established use cases with matured access management capabilities.”

The steady movement of applications to cloud and mobile architectures is also influencing adoption. The combination of functional offerings that are configured, rather than customized, and modern application architectures is causing a substantial portion of the market to adopt SaaS-delivered IAM.

“Organizations looking to use SaaS-delivered IAM should first ensure they have established satisfactory and well-supported traditional IAM software stacks. They then need to consider SaaS-delivered IAM once functional needs are met and the organizational benefits are realized,” concluded Mr. Data.

Gartner clients can read more in the report, “Predicts 2019: Identity and Access Management.” More predictions for all aspects of the IT industry can be found in the Gartner Trend Insight Report, “Predicts 2019: Leadership Means Expanding Options, Not Limiting Them,” a collection of research aimed at helping CIOs and IT leaders focus on how the landscape is shifting for individuals, businesses and IT organizations.

More information on Gartner’s top predictions can found on the Gartner Trends & Prediction Insight Hub.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Additional analysis on AI trends will be presented during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2019, the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and other senior IT executives. IT executives rely on these events to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to overcome business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Follow news and updates from the events using #GartnerSYM.

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities and build the successful organizations of tomorrow.

Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and objective resource for more than 15,000 organizations in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and organization size.

To learn more about how we help decision makers fuel the future of business, visit www.gartner.com.

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Media Contact:

Reethu Thachil
Wallis
Mobile: (+971) 55 350 0715
Email: gartner@wallispr.com

Laurence Goasduff
Gartner
Mobile: (+33) 6 45 29 03 49
Email: laurence.goasduff@gartner.com

 

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