COUNTRY FOCUS: GHANA
Kemi Okusanya, Vice President, Visa
West Africa, whose responsibilities
cover Ghana, tells Intelligent CIO that
there is a drift away from legacy
authentication methods like passwords,
that need to be typed towards multifactor
authentication systems.
Moving away from
passwords in the era
of technology
The outbreak of the COVID-19
pandemic has led many people
to fall back extensively on digital
infrastructure – be it collaborating
virtually with co-workers and clients across
geographies or ordering essential goods and
services through e-commerce portals.
If demonetisation was the first impetus,
COVID-19 may well be the second to
accelerate the use of digital payments. The
countrywide lockdown has, on the one hand,
propelled citizens to go digital and, on the
other, migrated a new set of consumers into
the digital payments ecosystem.
However, like the World Economic Forum’s
Global Risks Report 2020 mentions, data
theft is one of the top risks that businesses
are likely to face in the long term. And with
this unprecedented digital dependency,
what becomes critical is safe and secure
access to online services and unwavering
data protection of organisations
and consumers. With a possible rise
in cyberattacks under the current
circumstances, this is a much-needed step.
How effective are passwords?
Even though computer passwords have
come a long way since the 1960s, the
traditional methods of keying in a password,
including additional security questions is still
not tamper-proof, as the information is often
misspelt, forgotten or stolen.
With compromised credentials responsible
for over 80% of data breaches as per
Verizon Breach Investigations Report 2019,
at a time when remote working is gathering
steam, and is being contemplated as a
long-term move, employees, the human
element, can prove to be the weakest link in
an organisation’s security chain.
Hence, organisations are now realising the
need to adopt strategies that depend less
on passwords, by implementing multi-factor
authentication systems.
Technology to the rescue
The penetration of sophisticated
smartphones and tablets equipped with
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