To safeguard patients and their electronic health records (EHR), healthcare organizations are implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA)—an effective tool for limiting access to the right people by requiring users to present multiple pieces of evidence rather than a simple password. One challenge you may be facing with MFA is scaling its deployment across your organization. We recommend that you think about how to manage MFA across multiple devices and perhaps locations in your organization.
Managing MFA
Technologies such as Intel® Authenticate—available on devices with 8th Gen Intel® vPro™ Technology—simplify MFA scaling. It gives IT the flexibility to create and deploy custom MFA policies that enforce user identity protection. The IT administrator can mix and match identification factors for different users and provide varying levels of access across the corporate domain, network, VPN and more. Intel Authenticate provides a simple self-service enrollment tool for end users to quickly get started, eliminating calls to IT.
Enabling True "Hardware" Authentication
Lenovo recommends using MFA grounded in hardware. This MFA type is much harder for hackers and malicious code break into and capture password data because it's located deep in the silicon, isolated from the OS and applications.
There are several ways to authenticate users and ensure that the credentials are stored at the hardware level, and you can use Intel Authenticate to set up different combinations of the following:
- Facial Recognition: Infrared (IR) cameras are more secure than regular cameras for facial recognition. In addition, ThinkPad Glance utilizes face, eye and gaze tracking to automatically lock a device if the user is not present.
- Fingerprints: Lenovo Match on Chip Fingerprint Reader (MoC FPR) stores biometric credentials on a separate chip, making it almost impossible to hack.
- PIN: Short numeric codes can be used alongside other authentication factors as part of an MFA solution.
- Consider the following as supplementary MFA factors:
- Phone Proximity: Users can pair their smartphone with their PC via Bluetooth and securely use the proximity of their phone as an authentication factor.
- Location: Use location-based services to determine if a user is in an expected location like their office.
As you look to update your access management strategy, you'll need modern devices to support and scale hardware-based MFA and the convenience of solutions such as Windows Hello.
