Many IT end-user companies deployed hard tokens at a time when intermediate-risk choices were thinner on the ground, and some of these companies would have benefited from a more granular approach anyway. In general, we are seeing companies moving towards risk-based authentication augmented by mobile soft tokens (sometimes called from a mobile application through an API). These software-only solutions are easier and cheaper to deploy, particularly if the target population is on smartphones, and a lot easier to patch in case of an attack. Interestingly, risk-based authentication is now asked about not only in the B2C context (which was a norm about a year ago), but also in the B2E context as well. Right now, end-user companies are thinking about:

  1. How they can ditch hardware tokens altogether; and
  2. How can they can move risk-based authentication, and increasingly authorization (fraud management), into the cloud.