Law firm TaylorWessing has chosen the two-factor authentication (2FA) solution from Winfrasoft.
With a view that passwords should not feature in future of its security and authentication procedures, the IT department at TaylorWessing took an innovative step to find a strong two-factor authentication (2FA) solution. In the past, the IT department at TaylorWessing had trialled hard-tokens, but these proved extremely unpopular with partners of the law firm, who did not want to carry them everywhere.
In another trial, tokens on a mobile device were used and whilst they received a warm reception the particular solution caused headaches when partners travelled overseas causing the token to fail.
IT director Stuart Walters, said: “In order to achieve widespread adoption throughout the organisation, the 2FA solution we decided upon would without question have to deliver convenience.
“The biggest carrot of all for our partners at TaylorWessing would be freeing them from ever needing to change their password again. This is a huge incentive.” Selected was Winfrasoft’s PINgrid which overcomes one of the fatal flaws in password-based authentication – in that every time you login you must give away your ‘secret’. “With this solution it stays in the head of the user, making it far more secure, trusted and of course convenient,” Walters said.
PINgrid was implemented in phases, the first of which involved rolling it out across the IT department, and then introducing it to those partners who require secure remote access to the IT network, embedding PINgrid with the organisations existing Citrix and Juniper SSL VPN solutions.
“As we remove the need to remember a password there is no need to reset it, as everyone finds it too easy to remember their PINgrid pattern,” adds Walters. “The power of PINgrid is that not only is a pattern is so much easier to remember than a password, the solution is also easier to use and maintain and is more secure.”
