The total market for multifactor authentication technologies that include voice biometrics is expected to reach $10.75 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 19.67 percent, according to a new market research report by MarketsandMarkets.
Multifactor authentication (MFA) implies user and employee authentication by verifying two or more authentication techniques (such as hardware tokens, one-time passwords, passwords/PINs, and biometric traits).
According to the research, MFA has become the most important part of security due to an increase in unauthorized access, frauds, border intrusion, and other crimes. MFA is increasingly getting deployed at security checkpoints in airports, commercial complexes, retail malls, and financial institutions. Other areas where MFA is being used include government, defense, consumer electronics, commercial security, and healthcare. The report points out that MFA technology is slowly spreading across all industries wherever security is a prime concern.
MFA provides accurate authentication and negligible margin of duplicity or error, the report concluded.
With multifactor authentication, the variety of authentication techniques can be combined to form two-, three-, four-, and five-factor authentication models. Out of these models, two-factor authentication is commonly used in most of the applications. Two-factor authentication is the oldest type of MFA technique and can be seen at banks, ATMs, and at various government offices.
Two-factor authentication covers almost 90 percent of the market for multifactor authentication. Three-, four-, and five-factor authentication models are less used. Three-factor authentication is mostly used in private access areas like bank lockers, secret data access, defense, travel, and immigration. The use of four- and five-factor authentication models is restricted to high-cost projects in defense, research, and government.
The report also found that North America is the biggest multifactor authentication market, followed by Europe and Asia/Pacific.