A research report by Imprivata and the FIDO Alliance
Executive Summary
For organizations with frontline workers, authentication friction is leading to major real-world consequences, such as delaying vital patient care, work production and delivery of tasks. In a typical month, organizations estimate that more than a third of their frontline workers are hit by authentication issues when logging into their systems or applications. The impact of this is substantial, with each affected worker losing around 2.5 hours each month to repeated interruptions, and the average organization surveyed losing 32,400 working hours a year. This is on top of the time spent on routine sign-ins that succeed but may still slow the work down.
This friction can come from many different places such as account lockouts, password resets and repeated MFA prompts. Additionally, those surveyed expressed slow switching between users and devices, connectivity failures, and logging in while wearing protective equipment as common issues. Organizations cite each of these at similar rates, with no single barrier, issue, or cause standing out.
Nearly all organizations (95%) have observed frontline workers using workarounds like staying logged in, sharing credentials and bypassing controls. That adds risk to environments that are already complex by design, in fact six in ten decision-makers cite confirmed or suspected attempts to misuse account resets and social-engineer service desks.
Read the full report