As part of the strategy to strengthen security procedures for its services, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of the company PhoneFactor, a specialist in multi-factor authentication, for an undisclosed sum. The company, founded in 2001, enables secure access to applications and business services by installing an authentication mechanism at various levels, especially in mobile space.
Founded in 2001, PhoneFactor provides businesses with different authentication methods that have nothing to do with passwords or security tokens. Although the company is a specialist in mobile authentication, it also provides authentication solution via SMS.
As pointed out by Microsoft in one of their corporate blogs, PhoneFactor has become popular because their solutions can interoperate well with Microsoft products and services, including Outlook Web Access, Internet Information Services and Active Directory services. In this way, users would not have to learn new passwords, and administrators and application developers could use an infrastructure that is already known to them. In addition, PhoneFactor is based on authentication through mobile devices that users already have.
“With Microsoft’s product breadth and distribution reach, it will be possible to bring the benefits of PhoneFactor to a broader set of customers, partners and developers than we could as a stand-alone company,” wrote Timothy Sutton, PhoneFactor’s CEO, in a blog post. “And as part of Microsoft, we will work to improve the interoperability and ease of use of our solutions.”
The Redmond company has justified its decision by arguing that users tend to connect to applications and services from different types of devices (laptops, personal, enterprise, mobile, etc.). However, all these devices use often one factor of authentication to protect the security of the user data. Microsoft wants to go for multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase access security.
“The acquisition of PhoneFactor will help Microsoft bring effective and easy-to-use multifactor authentication to our cloud services and on-premise applications,” said Bharat Shah, corporate vice president for the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, in a statement. “In addition, PhoneFactor’s solutions will help Microsoft customers, partners and developers enhance the security of almost any authentication scenario.”
The new acquisition can help Microsoft customers to protect their data in SharePoint enterprise platform on file servers and business applications that run locally. In addition, the software of PhoneFactor could improve the security of applications running in the cloud. The Redmond company also intends to carry out its services integration with Active Directory, Windows Azure and Office 365.