Protecting the workforce in challenging times

RSA has introduced RSA SecurID^® Access offerings that are designed to support organizations struggling to protect and optimize their workforces in this challenging environment. The new solutions broaden protection and reduce friction for both administrators and users, particularly as organizations tap into the benefits of the cloud for remote workers.

 

“While interest in transitioning security management technologies to cloud environments has steadily increased over the past few years, the global pandemic has dramatically accelerated adoption plans,” noted Steve Brasen, Research Director with Enterprise Management Associates. “Organizations are particularly feeling the urgency with enabling cloud-hosted solutions supporting identity and access management (IAM). With applications, data, and IT services broadly distributed across business networks and public cloud environments, organizations require unified solutions to centrally and consistently manage access to critical resources. RSA's SecurID Access hybrid platform successfully meets modern and emerging requirements for minimizing IAM management efforts while enhancing security effectiveness.”

 

Faster path to digital with a secure, hybrid approach to the cloud

 

To survive and thrive in the current environment, organizations are seeking solutions that optimize processes by using cloud applications. However, a proactive approach to digital risk is required to ensure successful adoption. RSA SecurID Access minimizes identity risk with a unique hybrid model that now integrates all of the on-premises and cloud components into a unified solution, making it faster and easier for on-prem customers to connect to the cloud. This approach also protects SaaS and legacy applications, across public clouds and private networks, while providing a consistent user experience.

 

For customers already embracing the advantages of the cloud, RSA SecurID Access provides an additional layer of protection and availability with its new Failover Node Service. If access to the cloud service slows or becomes unavailable, the on-prem component of RSA SecurID Access takes over authentication requests. This high-availability innovation provides 24x7 authentication and protection, reducing risk and instilling confidence to accelerate cloud adoption.

 

Broader protection with a frictionless experience

 

With the surge in standing up remote workforces, securing remote logins and providing a frictionless experience for users has become increasingly important. RSA SecurID Access is the most-widely deployed multi-factor authentication solution, and offers the broadest range of authentication methods, including recent innovations in facial recognition for Android devices, biometrics for legacy apps, and FIDO2 for passwordless hardware, software and embedded authentication. RSA SecurID Access simplifies and customizes the user experience by auto-detecting the device or method – wearables, proximity, fingerprint, face recognition, SMS, email, voice, and more – before prompting the user. Additionally, users can now be enrolled via one-time activation code to quickly onboard remote workers.

 

New RSA SecurID Access features for Microsoft Windows and macOS^® devices extend powerful multi-factor authentication to enhance endpoint protection and remote logins, which are critical for the modern workforce. Furthermore, RSA is the only vendor to offer true “no fail-open” offline authentication for both Microsoft Windows and macOS laptop users who are not connected to a network. While other solutions may provide limited offline access, RSA ensures that users are fully authenticated to sign in when offline, improving security, user experience and productivity.

 

“RSA was honored to be a trusted partner during the global work from home surge, helping our customers to rapidly provide a secure remote workforce for their employees. We continue to innovate to help them optimize in the ‘new world’ with features like macOS and high availability for the cloud,” said Jim Ducharme, VP of Identity and Fraud & Risk Intelligence, RSA. “Customers trust RSA because we provide the whole package – the broadest range of authentication methods, an unrivalled hybrid approach, and the experience to not only simplify the journey to the cloud, but ensure that modern authentication protects organizations from ground to cloud.”

 

Next-generation capabilities to manage current and future risks

 

In today’s increasingly global and remote workforce, managing and monitoring user access across a hybrid IT environment is a critical security concern. The perimeter shift has elevated the need for detection, investigation and response to threats. RSA’s new Threat-Aware Authentication enables security operations teams to detect abnormal user and machine activities inside or outside of the corporate premises, as well as network anomalies, and can share this information with RSA SecurID Access to enrich authentication policy decisions. With threat intelligence, organizations can mitigate the risk of insider threat and data breach, and ensure stronger, continuous authentication.

 

To combat future risks, organizations need an efficient way to consume innovations, however, accessing those capabilities often requires cumbersome, multi-step upgrade processes. RSA SecurID Access delivers new innovations on a monthly release schedule and now offers Direct Upgrade for on-prem capabilities, eliminating time-consuming, serial upgrades. With these in-place upgrades, organizations can benefit from the latest features and improved security, while saving time and costs.