Less than a quarter of organisations fully confident ex-workers can’t access company infrastructure

New research from identity-native infrastructure access provider Teleport has revealed that less than a quarter of organisations are totally confident that their former workers are unable to access the company’s infrastructure.

Teleport's second annual State of Infrastructure Access and Security Report found that just 24 per cent of firms polled were 100 per cent confident that access to company infrastructure had been revoked for ex-employees.

Close to half of organisations said they were less than 50 per cent confident that former employees could no longer access infrastructure. Compared to last year’s study, the new research shows a 55 per cent year over year increase in organisations with less than 50 per cent confidence.

The report highlighted growing awareness of the need to move away from passwords and towards passwordless access. Last year, 77 per cent recognised the importance of passwordless infrastructure, while, this year, 87 per cent of respondents said the issue was important or very important.

77 per cent of those polled said they have an active initiative in place for moving to passwordless access and 78 per cent have an active initiative to move towards biometric authentication, widely viewed as the most effective tool for ensuring secure access.

Although 55 per cent already use biometrics, there remain significant hurdles to widespread adoption, with 62 per cent concerned about privacy when moving from passwords to biometric authentication and 55 per cent citing a lack of devices that are capable of supporting biometrics.

Overall, the survey showed that 80 per cent of organisations still use passwords as their top security method for ensuring secure access. On average, organisations use 5.7 different tools for managing access policy.

Teleport CEO Ev Kontsevoy said: "With architectures growing in complexity, coupled with the rising number of threats and bad actors, DevOps and security engineering leaders cannot afford to delay any longer in turning their plans into actions. Secretless, identity-based infrastructure access is the only way forward."