The Top 11 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Solutions For Business
Multi-factor authentication ensures only legitimate users can access accounts and applications. Here’s our list of the top MFA solutions for business.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solutions improve business security by enforcing additional authentication measures, such as a text message, or a fingerprint, before users can access accounts that hold sensitive information or controls.
Essentially, with MFA in place businesses have an extra layer of security over their accounts. It help to ensure that everyone who accesses company information are really who they say they are, helping to reduce the risk of account compromise. Multi-factor authentication tools should send users an email, text, or require a biometric check, such as a FaceID check or fingerprint scan, before users can login.
This isn’t designed to make life more difficult, but to stop attackers from getting into accounts in the case of a password compromise. It should still be easy and quick for legitimate users to get into accounts, which is why finding the right MFA solution is so important.
To help you find the right solution, here’s our list of the top MFA solutions for businesses. In this list we’ll cover what MFA functionality each vendor offers, what customers have to say about the solution, and what the extra benefits of each service are. Many of these solutions will fit into a wider identify management platform, so we’ll also cover any additional features each vendor provides. Let’s jump right into the list!
The Best Multi-Factor Authentication Solutions Includes:
- Duo Multi-Factor Authentication | Prove MFA | HID Global Identity and Access Management | ESET Secure Authentication | Ping Identity | TypingDNA Verify 2FA | Thales SafeNet Trusted Access | JumpCloud Protect | ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus | Twilio Authy | OKTA Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication
Cisco Duo Multi-Factor Authentication
Duo Security, acquired by Cisco in 2018, provides an access management solution that secures employee access to corporate accounts, helping businesses to reduce credential-based security risks and meet regulatory compliance. Duo’s solution supports a wide range of authentication methods, which makes it easy for all users to log into their accounts securely, no matter what device they’re using or where they’re working. Duo’s zero-trust solution is available via five plans, from a compact version for smaller teams right through to a comprehensive enterprise-grade version for larger businesses. This enables Duo to help organizations of any size to secure and monitor their account access.
Duo Security’s zero-trust MFA enables users to verify their identities via the Duo mobile app, which allows users to easily hit “approve” or “deny” for login attempts. Duo also integrates with universal 2nd factor authentication tokens, hardware tokens, mobile passcodes, U2F USB devices, and biometric controls built into the user’s device, such as FaceID. This makes it a good option for companies who want to be able to enforce a wide range of authentication controls across a diverse device fleet or hybrid office environment. Duo’s integrated SSO means that users only have to verify their identity at the beginning of their session, ensuring a seamless login experience that causes the user little disruption. From the management console, admins can configure adaptive authentication policies based on factors such as user location, device and role. Duo checks user login data against these policies for anomalous access attempts, to ensure that further verification is only required for logins which are considered to be high-risk, increasing login efficiency.
Duo is cloud-based and integrates natively with existing applications. This makes it easy to roll out across an organization and gives the solution the flexibility to scale up as your business grows. Customers praise its user-friendly interface, and the multi-tenant dashboard makes it popular amongst MSP customers who can then manage Duo on their clients’ behalf. We recommend Duo as a strong MFA solution for organizations of all sizes looking for a user-friendly yet powerful MFA solution.
Prove MFA
Prove’s Auth solution is a comprehensive suite of mobile-first authenticators ranging from traditional OTPs to sophisticated mobile authentication and biometric authenticators for passwordless login and as a seamless second factor method of authentication. With this authenticator suite, clients can tailor authentication across low to high-risk transactions to minimize friction while prioritizing customer experience.
Prove’s Phone-Centric Identity™ technology is unique in that it leverages the mobile phone and phone number as the primary authenticator. This enables clients to deterministically authenticate customer identities with certainty (either yes or no) as opposed to a probabilistic approach. More than 1,000 companies and over 500 banks including 8 of the top 10 U.S. banks use Prove to mitigate fraud while boosting revenue, reducing operating costs, and improving customer experiences across all channels.
Prove provides strong identity security, going beyond traditional multi-factor authentication to offer risk-based authentication. In addition to verifying that the phone number is possessed by the user, Prove’s Trust Score™ offers real-time risk scoring looking at ”reputation’ indicators from real-time signals, such as number activity, how long the number has been in use, and whether the phone number has been used by the customer in other places–enabling real-time, dynamic behavioral and contextual risk scoring. This helps build a holistic identity score, vastly improving account security without increasing complexity for security teams.
Prove is the ideal vendor for organizations looking to deploy an MFA solution to secure their own applications and services. It provides strong authentication capabilities to prevent against digital account compromise and fraud, reduces the complexity of authentication for end users, and is an easy-to-manage solution for admins—automating key processes and providing many policies and features to secure account access.
Download Prove’s white paper to learn more about how to create secure, frictionless experiences using next-gen authentication technologies.
HID Identity and Access Management
HID Global is a market leading cybersecurity vendor that offers enterprise-grade, user-friendly identity verification solutions. HID’s Advanced Multi-Factor Authentication solution is a part of their Identity and Access Management (IAM) suite, sitting alongside identity and risk-based management products. The IAM suite enables IT teams to secure and manage access to both logical and physical assets, and HID currently secures over 85 million user identities globally with this offering. Advanced MFA enables secure access to corporate networks, VPNs and cloud applications such as Office 365. Additionally, the central management console features robust reporting capabilities, which administrators can use to gain insights into account usage and who is accessing which areas within the network.
HID Global’s Advanced MFA solution is centred around a zero-trust converged credential ecosystem. This system enables secure access to both physical corporate assets, like buildings, and logical assets such as networks. The system supports authentication via hardware tokens, PKI-based smart cards, digital certificates, mobile push notifications, and biometrics – which is particularly useful for organizations looking for a risk-based method. These methods support various digital protocols, including FIDO and OATH. Additionally, HID’s smart cards enable secure physical access to company sites. HID’s Advanced MFA supports single sign-on (SSO), so that users don’t have to remember multiple passwords. This saves IT resources from being spent dealing with password reset requests. HID IAM’s admin console also features powerful reporting and analytics tools, which leverage sophisticated AI to provide insights into who is accessing what parts of the network, as well as enable organizations to ensure security compliance.
Advanced MFA can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. This makes it easy to set up, highly scalable and flexible. Because of this, Advanced MFA is a strong solution for organizations with plans for growth, those with remote or hybrid-remote environments, and those with multiple office sites. HID Global’s MFA solution is particularly popular among finance and government industries, due to its high level of security and its robust management features. We recommend IAM Advanced MFA as a strong solution for any mid-sized organization or enterprise looking to secure and verify user access to corporate assets across multiple business levels.
ESET Secure Authentication
ESET is a market-leading vendor in lightweight, user-friendly cybersecurity solutions. ESET Secure Authentication is their enterprise two-factor authentication (2FA) solution, designed to reduce the risks associated with stolen password by requiring users to verify their identity in two ways before being granted access to a system. Currently supporting over 100 million users worldwide, ESET’s solution supports a range of authentication methods, ensuring that it’s compatible for all users, no matter what device they’re using to authenticate. It supports not only on-premises applications, but also web and cloud services such as Office 365 and Dropbox via SAML protocol integration, ensuring compliance and data security across all business systems.
With ESET Secure Authentication, users can verify their identity via mobile authentication apps, hardware tokens, FIDO security keys or ESET’s own push notifications, which are compatible with iOS and Android systems. This ensures that all users can interact easily with the solution, no matter what device they’re working on. As well as on-premises and cloud applications, ESET Secure Authentication’s full-featured API supports access security for remote desktop protocols and most popular corporate VPNs, including Barracuda, Cisco, Citrix and Palo Alto.
ESET Secure Authentication is fully cloud-based. Admins can manage the solution via a single web-based console, where they can monitor authentication organization-wide, set authentication policies, and generate access reports for compliance purposes. According to ESET, the solution deploys in just ten minutes, no matter how many users are being onboarded. This makes it suitable for both smaller businesses without a dedicated IT resource, and large enterprises that need to onboard a lot of users quickly. We recommend ESET Secure Authentication as a strong, intuitive solution for organization that want to implement two-factor authentication across all of their business systems and applications, no matter where they’re hosted.
Ping Identity Multi-Factor Authentication
Ping Identity is an identity management suite that offers several different identity management features. This includes Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication and Directory. Ping is distributed via the cloud, providing an identity-as-a-service model as well as a software based solution. Ping has focussed on providing easy integrations for enterprise customers, allowing admins to use APIs, SDKs and integration kits to streamline implementation with existing infrastructure.
Ping uses contextual based adaptive authentication, that provides a better user experience and more effective security controls, without impacting on business productivity. This means that users can choose authentication methods, and admins can be sure a user is who they say they are, with factors checked like geolocation, IP Address and time since last authentication. With Ping, users can even choose to leave passwords behind entirely, with stronger authentication methods like mobile push authentication, QR codes and other compliant authentication methods.
Customers praise how easy it is to build, secure and maintain application integration using Ping Identity. Customers also say Ping is a reliable and flexible authentication platform that meets compliance needs. End users also report that it’s easy to just log on and have access to all the applications that they need. Ping is most suitable for larger organizations that need to be able to integrate MFA across all their applications, with flexibility in deployment and adaptive authentication policies.
TypingDNA Verify 2FA
TypingDNA provides passive authentication technology that is designed to provide strong protection against account compromise, while minimizing user effort and friction. Verify 2FA is a 2FA authentication solution that replaces SMS OTP codes with just typing four words (similar to a CAPTCHA), which are verified in the background with typing biometrics authentication technology for an improved user experience that does not impede account security.
Verify 2FA records biometric data, also known as keystroke dynamics, to allow organizations to authenticate their users by recognizing the way they type, comparing how users are typing on their keyboards against previous recordings. The solution uses AI to recognise users based on how they type the four words they see on the screen. Users are granted access if their action matches their typical baseline typing behavior and can be sent an SMS OTP as a secondary method of authentication if they do not match, or if something like an injury impacts their ability to type. Verify 2FA uses SMS or email codes as Root of Trust (RoT), improving overall account protection and keeping SMS costs low by requiring them only when users fail TypingDNA’s verification. Verify 2FA requires integration with Twilio and Sendgrid to facilitate sending SMS and email OTP’s.
The Expert Insights Team, upon demoing TypingDNA’s solution, were particularly impressed with the user-friendly interface and seamless login experience. The solution provides plans at two levels; the starter plan offers authentication for up to 1,000 users and is available at no cost for a limited time, while the paid plan can accommodate any number of users for $0.01 per active user per month. We would recommend Verify 2FA to organizations of any size and from any industry who are interested in a less traditional, cost-effective, and secure solution with low user friction.
Thales SafeNet Trusted Access
Thales is a cloud data security provider that offers solutions for a number of user cases, including human and machine identity verification, access authorization, data discovery and encryption. SafeNet Trusted Access is Thales’ access management and authentication solution that enables organizations to manage user access to corporate applications and cloud services via a single, unified platform. To help ensure account security and protect against credential-based attacks such as account takeover, SafeNet Trusted Access features multi-factor authentication, adaptive and contextual authentication, integrated single sign-on and scenario-based access policies.
SafeNet Trusted Access verifies user identities via risk-based or “adaptive” multi-factor authentication. It analyzes the context of each users’ login for anomalous behavior and increases authentication requirements only if the login is considered unusual or risky. This ensures security without impacting end users’ login experience unnecessarily. SafeNet Trusted Access supports a wide range of authentication methods, including traditional password- and token-based authentication, certificate-based smart cards and integrated Kerberos authentication as well as modern authentication technologies such as SAML and OIDC. As well as MFA, SafeNet Trusted Access offers in-built single sign-on, which enables users to access all of their cloud applications via one set of login credentials (and one authentication process where necessary). Admins can manage MFA, adaptive authentication and SSO policies via one central policy engine. All policies can be configured at a user, group or application level.
Delivered as-a-Service, SafeNet Trusted Access deploys quickly in the cloud and offers the flexibility to easily scale as your organization grows. The platform supports authentication across Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android operating systems, as well as VPNs and cloud services. End users praise Thales’ solution for its ease of use, while admins praise its consistency and customer support. We recommend Thales SafeNet Trusted Access as a strong MFA solution for organizations who want to secure user access to cloud and web-bsaed applications and VPN usage, and particularly those who want integrated SSO combined with strong authentication capabilities.
JumpCloud Protect
JumpCloud is a cloud directory platform that enables organizations to enforce and manage identity and access management tools—such as multi-factor authentication and single sign-on—and device management tools—mobile device management and patch management—via a single, central interface. JumpCloud makes it easy for IT admins to secure their users’ accounts and devices, implement and maintain Zero Trust policies, and demonstrate compliance with data protection standards.
JumpCloud’s MFA solution enables admins to secure user accounts against credential related breaches such as brute force and phishing attacks. Via the JumpCloud ProtectTM app, JumpCloud MFA supports a range of authentication methods that include push notification, universal second factor (UTF) keys, time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs), and in-device biometrics, enabling admins to choose the method best suited to their users to deliver a more secure and frictionless login experience.
JumpCloud administrators can set policies around logins—such as the user’s device and location—and, if the login is deemed out of policy, users are prompted to verify their identities via MFA. This helps to secure accounts against unauthorized access by attackers to access sensitive data through the use of stolen credentials JumpCloud MFA also streamlines the administration process for IT administrators. Admins can enforce MFA easily from the same portal for all users; with the platform’s user-friendly enrollment feature, admins can establish flexible time frames for users to set up MFA remotely, with automated reminders to ensure that users comply.
JumpCloud MFA is entirely cloud-based, making it easily scalable, as well as quick to deploy and integrate with an organization’s existing IT environment. The JumpCloud Protect app is compatible with Apple iOS and Android devices and can be used as a second factor with macOS, Windows and Linux devices, VPN and wireless networks, and servers.
JumpCloud is used by over 150,000 organizations worldwide and is consistently ranked as a top solution by customers. Users praise JumpCloud for its simple, user-friendly interface and admins praise the ease with which they can implement MFA across their organizations. We recommend JumpCloud MFA as a smart choice for small, medium enterprises and mid-market organizations looking for easy-to-manage account security that they can roll out across a remote or hybrid workforce with minimum effort using their existing resources.
ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus
ManageEngine is an established software vendor that forms the IT management division of business software company Zoho Corporation. ADSelfService Plus is its powerful password management, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on solution that offers Endpoint MFA to help organizations better secure access to machines (Windows, macOS, and LinuxOS), VPNs, applications, endpoints, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). In terms of pricing, ADSelfService Plus comes in three tiers (Free, Standard, and Professional), but we should note that Endpoint MFA capabilities are only available as part of the highest tier—Professional Edition—which starts at $1195 for 500 domain users annually.
ADSelfService Plus enables organizations to protect multiple points of access with its strong MFA capabilities. Users can also protect SSO logins with MFA, both reducing the need to remember multiple passwords while adding an extra layer of security. The solution works firstly by authenticating user identity via their Active Directory domain credentials. Users are then prompted to authenticate using a second factor of authentication—with the platform offering an impressive 18 modes of authenticating identity, including security questions, SMS and email codes, authenticator apps, hardware security tokens, and QR codes, fingerprint, and facial recognition, and more. From the admin console, admins can also configure conditional access policies to determine which authentication methods are enforced for which groups of users and in which contexts.
In terms of installation, the solution can be installed both on servers and machines. Admins can also choose whether to install the 64-bit version or the 32-bit version, depending on their requirements. Current users’ rate ADSelfService Plus highly for its simple set up and deployment and easy-to-use platform. However, some note that the interface itself feels a little outdated. As a trusted partner to nine in ten Fortune 100 companies, we recommend ManageEngine’s ADSelfService Plus for larger organizations—particularly in industries such as finance, IT, healthcare, and government—that are looking for strong MFA to secure all access points, alongside advanced self-service password management capabilities and SSO.
Twilio Authy
Via their 2FA solution “Authy”, Twilio provides a 2FA smartphone app for consumers, a 2FA Rest API for developers and a full authentication platform for enterprise. Each time a user attempts to log into an account, or a transaction is made, Authy creates a unique token code. Authy then authenticates all users’ identities using a mobile application, helping to reduce the risk of account compromise and theft.
Twilio Authy provides users with an intuitive 2FA experiences, automatically working on new devices, backing up data in the cloud and it works anywhere, even if your device is offline or has a poor internet connection, as codes are generated on the device itself.
Twilio Authy is popular with customers, especially small businesses. Customers feedback that the Authy service is convenient and quick to use, helping to prevent any breaches of information and giving peace of mind. Twilio Authy is a good option for businesses looking for 2FA across their accounts, especially smaller teams that need every user to authenticate their identity.
OKTA Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication
OKTA’s multi-factor authentication solution secures access for all your business accounts by authenticating all of your employees, partners and customers’ identities. OKTA’s service is designed to be secure, simple and intelligent. They’ve focussed on creating an easy to use admin portal that enforces MFA across the organization, with policies that enforces contextual based login in challenges.
What this in effect means is that users are prompted to verify their accounts based on contextual factors, so that user productivity is only impacted when it’s necessary for security reasons. For example, you may be prompted to authenticate your identity when you log in at a new location, on a new IP address, or on a new device. OKTA also support a range of different authentication methods, including security questions, one time passcodes sent via SMS, voice and email, a mobile app and biometrics.
Customers praise OKTA for it’s feature-rich offering, with an intuitive user interface. Customers report that it’s easy to sign in quickly, with different options for verification that means you can get into accounts even if you don’t have your phone to hand. OKTA is a good option for mid-market and larger enterprises, who need multiple authentication options and policies, without compromising user experience.