Authentication Technologies For Corporate Email Solutions What You Should Really Look Into?

Emails today play a critical role in the organization functioning and over the years technology supporting this communication infrastructure have also improved a lot. Everyday millions of emails are sent from companies to customers and suppliers, from employees to their line managers and coworkers. The reason why email has gain importance in the overall corporate communication space is because of:

a) Immediacy

b) Smart record keeping capacity

c) Easy accessibility

d) Low costs

The rising importance of this technological mode of communication is also making it more open to potential vulnerability of getting hacked. The potential amount of critical information travelling through email networks make it the dearest spot for hackers to attack because once you are into someone’s corporate email network your chances of derailing other elements of the corporate information architecture becomes easier. With enterprises becomes more mobile the access to email is no more stipulated under a corporate firewall network. The modern enterprise email platforms are always coming with multiple accessibility modes across devices and operating system to meet every changing needs of the organization to support increased productivity also making it more open to attacks.At present your corporate email infrastructure is getting compromised at various points:

a) On devices

b) On networks

c) On Servers

d) On Recipient devices

The common forms of attacks are:

a) Virus attacks which not only leads to data breach but also derail the total technology network

b) Malware attacks

c) Phishing attacks

All these form of vulnerabilities have their ultimate objective of stealing your critical business information which can have even long term effects on the company’s equity. Even organization most of times have been forced to pay the hackers huge sums of money to save the data from getting exposed in the public domain.

This calls for a smarter security at the user level - A smarter security means an able authentication technology which is line with organization mode of functioning and simultaneously makes your corporate communication structure more robust.

In the present context the two factor authentication have taken over by multifactor factor technology.So in present context if you are looking at Two factor authentication for Email solutions you should look at the following parameters:

a) Easy adoption: What CTO and CSO should look into easier implementation across existing system without making any changes in the current IT infrastructure? The older technology depended a lot on the ability of the system on which it has to be implemented. If the organization IT infrastructure is based on legacy systems the older form of authentication technologies had a tough time in getting glued with that. Looking at options which can be implemented at the protocol level makes it easier so the dependency on current IT infrastructure becomes negligible.

b) Easy Authentication: The traditional modes of user authentication worked on OTP and hardware tokens which has its own limitation plus at certain times they also derail the user experience to an extent reducing employee productivity. Authentication technologies should more direct towards giving more security independence to the user without compromising security. Authentication with the help of biometric data of the user as the second factor to authenticate user login make it more easy for the user and don’t even affect employee productivity any way as it gives them one touch access.

c) Platform independent: Slowly with the adoption of BYOD policy across enterprises, has given employees an ease of use but which the devices can be multiple which are run across different operating systems calls for the need of two factor authentication technology which can adopted across email platforms running on different devices and Operating system.

It’s very important that you should give user security the top line priority in your information security strategy but while looking at technologies to support them should based upon your current corporate IT infrastructure and culture or otherwise it might improve your security but can affect organization’s functioning.

I am Technology Evangelist. I am part of the core team of Authshield Labs and have been actively involved in research on information security vulnerabilities.