Two weeks ago, I was watching TV at my in-laws’ and my father-in-law asks if I can help him with a computer problem. "It’s locked me out.” As with many of us in IT, we moonlight as our family’s computer service technicians.

I ambled over his computer expecting to find some type of ransomware or other malware, but instead was surprised to find that Windows was asking me for a password. It was just the standard login screen. My guess is that Windows had updated and asked him for a password which he set to something he couldn’t remember. So, I spent a couple of hours doing the restore and a few other simple tricks to see if I could get in. Nothing worked.

Since the computer is use mostly for web surfing and playing games, I took the easy way out and went to the Microsoft store, bought a new copy of Windows 10, and re-installed from scratch.

Thankfully, the fix only cost me a little bit of money and some time troubleshooting, but for the folks that encounter this in a corporate environment, well…you can’t just reinstall to a fresh PC every time an end-user makes a mistake like this.

IDaaS Adoption Continues to Increase

Frankly, we need to be getting away from passwords in general. We know they’re not very secure and they’re a usability nightmare. That said, I’m happy to be witness to the rise of next generation authentication services that are easy to deploy with a cloud SaaS model, like Okta or Oracle IDCS, for example.

This is an area where, as a company, we’ve invested in both building out our professional services teams and product portfolio to bridge some of the gaps between these IDaaS technologies as they continue to mature, along with corporate Hybrid Cloud environments, and the knowledge base of IT professionals.

As adoption rates for this technology have continued to increase with corporations over the past two years, we’ve encountered many large enterprises looking for guidance in this area.

A challenge we resolve for our customers is How do we cost effectively secure our applications in a Hybrid Cloud environment? If this is something you’ve either asked yourself or have heard around the office, give us a call.

We’re happy to walk you through the benefits of using an IDaaS with your applications specifically to reduce costs, complexity, and helpdesk calls while also improving your security posture.