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Two-factor authentication for cyber safety

Posted by Amy Thibault
Amy Thibault

 

Cyber security is a significant sustainability challenge for every industry today.

Cyber attacks come in many forms and almost every week we read about another company that has had data become compromised, either from ransomware in a corporation or banking data captured from a retailer. How do you defend against those kinds of attacks while giving your people easy, but secure access to the site or asset data they need in order to efficiently make the best business decisions?

There are several ways, both on the back end and in the office. From the back end, Zedi SaaS SCADA employs the latest and most powerful security measures available. Then there’s the security level that is experienced from your end users, or employees.

Experts say that well over 50 percent of data breaches come from employees opening phishing spam emails or otherwise allowing their account to be compromised. It's important for your data security, company health and sustainability to determine and manage the exact steps to take that will minimize the human risk involved.

Experts also say the something as simple as two-factor authentication—2FA, or 2F as it’s known in the industry—can exponentially improve your data security. This is why you will gain access to 2F (two factor) with Emerson's Zedi SaaS SCADA; it's an option you can easily enable your business with when you use our cloud platform.

Now there are several kinds of 2FA—one involves a piece of hardware known as a token generator. This is something people have to carry around, which means, as you can probably imagine, it gets lost. When it’s lost, you can’t log in, so not ideal by a long shot. Others—push notifications—involve first entering a password then being sent a randomly-generated authentication code, by text to a cell number. These codes are usually only good for a few minutes. There are others including voice or face recognition, but you get the point. It keeps someone from simply hacking your passcode and then getting into your company data—or in personal situations, your bank account, shopping or social media accounts.

 

Remotely Beneficial

More and more workers are logging in remotely instead of sitting at a device connected directly to the company’s network or Wi-Fi. For many industries this is hardly new—people at a remote site already needed access to data and control—but now office staff have significantly increased the remote worker count and need for more secure ways of attaining the right data, at the right time and in a way that's not only secure, but easy to digest and make sense of what it's trying to tell you about the asset, site or other important operational impact.

To mitigate the concerns about remote login security, Zedi SaaS SCADA leverages the power of Microsoft Authenticator to keep your data safe—yet accessible to those who need it—24/7. So no matter what site, hotel, coffee shop, or living room that authorized user is actually working from they have secure access to the company data they need, whenever they need it.

2-factor cloud platform

 

No one wants to be the next company whose name is all over the news due to a security breach—it can quickly escalate a negative brand image, high financial impacts, lost time trying to recover from it and frustrated employees. Yet, too often, no one wants to believe it can happen to them, either. Why take that chance? After an incident, those companies greatly wish they’d spent some extra effort in cybersecurity because it would have been MUCH less costly, less stressful and far less hazardous to the long-term health of the business than the breach itself; the breach has strong, horrible impacts from every direction.

That’s why we make sure we take every measure to keep your data safe—and still accessible to your authorized users anytime, anywhere.

 

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Topics: IIoT, Software, Data, SaaS SCADA, Security, Cloud, 2-factor, Cybersecurity

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