GrIDsure, the innovative alternative to PINs and passwords, today announced that it has partnered with Osirium, a provider of secure system administration solutions. The partnership will enable Osirium to offer GrIDsure’s unique strong authentication method to customers using its central single sign-on administration system.
To examine the current state of system administration security, Osirium recently conducted a survey of 452 IT security administrators which showed that a significant proportion of companies have lax security policies and procedures and sysadmin teams which are becoming increasingly burdened by the common daily tasks they need to complete. The survey results demonstrated that:
• 48% used either a static password or a user ID to authenticate access to security devices
• 37% wrote down their passwords for accessing security devices
• 46% shared their passwords with colleagues
• 33% had to gather data daily for compliance purposes, this process taking 20% of respondents more than 30 minutes to complete and another 20% at least 60 minutes.
David Guyatt, CEO of Osirium commented: “Although we knew that many system administrators were not implementing appropriate authentication measures to control access to security devices we were still surprised by the severity of the problem, as highlighted by our survey results. It is clear that security practices are often not rigorous enough, mainly due to the fact that overburdened but technically savvy sysadmin teams can very easily circumvent existing security procedures in order to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as they can.
“We believe that using strong authentication is best practice for administrators who are accessing security devices, rather than relying on problematic static usernames and passwords. Osirium is the industry’s definitive solution for governing privilege user access and automating tasks so partnering with GrIDsure means that we can now offer our customers a highly secure and simple to use authentication method. GrIDsure’s grid-based solution is very easy to use as patterns are easier to remember than traditional passwords and highly secure as the pattern possibilities are endless.
Stephen Howes, CEO, GrIDsure added: “Integrating GrIDsure into Osirium’s solution has once again shown that GrIDsure can be a very effective extra ingredient in the overall security mix of a solution. The research shows that IT administrators are still not taking authentication seriously enough, so we’re pleased to be offering Osirium’s customers a user friendly and cost effective strong authentication solution for accessing their security devices.”
