19 September, 2005 - 10:39am

Gartner recently warned that in two years, 80% of organizations will have reached a password breaking point. They claim that passwords will become increasingly unusable as organizations try to stay ahead of hackers by making them more complex and increasing the frequency of changes. Ant Allen, Gartner Research VP, likened this to "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic".

Gartner analyst Jay Heiser, also pointed out some problems with this, in that users respond by forgetting passwords, or writing them down, which can compromise security in a different way. The predictions were made at their annual IT Security Summit in London.

They stated that the future of authentication is something stronger, and recommended the move to two-factor authentication, noting that RSA Security Tokens are becoming increasingly popular. Sxip Access, our identity management solution for on-demand applications, supports two-factor authentication of users to salesforce.com with RSA SecurID.