The coronavirus pandemic has provided many enterprises with an emergency light switch moment. One minute, most employees are working in the company office. The next minute, they are all forced to work remotely. No preparation, no planning, good luck.

This situation, duplicated across thousands of global businesses large and small weeks ago, has required a closer look at the tools needed to verify every user on a suddenly more vulnerable network using trusted devices while providing limited access.

“When you take all the workers and disperse them to home, each one of their systems and networks becomes an extension of the attack surface,” said Corey Williams (pictured), vice president of marketing at Idaptive LLC. “We talk with our customers about putting in layers that can balance security but also provide a more friction-free user experience. It reduces the scope from everyone on earth, from any device on earth, to just the people that you trust and have identified.”

Williams spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Idaptive provides customers with appropriate layers of security and the future of passwords.

Zero-trust state of mind

Unless a company is born in the cloud, it’s difficult to become a virtual enterprise overnight with the correct levels of system protection. Idaptive helps customers focus on finding the right balance for security through what it calls Next-Gen Access.

“It’s essentially a combination or layers of technology, like single sign-on, multifactor authentication, provisioning and analytics,” Williams said. “All of that is intended to provide a more secure experience where we can but with additional factors besides a password in front of the user. Ultimately, the reason you want to do that is to arrive at a zero-trust state of mind.”

For those who are hoping that a zero-trust state of mind also means zero passwords, Williams has disappointing news.

“It’s a little bit like the clothes in the back of my closet; you never quite get rid of everything,” Williams said. “Passwords will always be with us in some form because they’re baked into technology that’s been around forever.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE