Only a quarter of businesses have confidence ex-employees can no longer access infrastructure

Only 24 percent of respondents to a new survey are fully confident that ex-employees no longer have access to their company's infrastructure, while almost half of organizations are less than 50 percent confident that former employees no longer have access.

The study from Teleport also finds infrastructure is becoming more complex, with organizations using on average 5.7 different tools to manage access policy, making it complicated and time-consuming to completely shut off access.

More than half (57 percent) of respondents also say their organization has implemented new security methods that failed to be adopted by employees.

"The 2022 Infrastructure Access and Security Report definitively shows that DevOps, security engineering and other security professionals understand the challenges they face, as well as the most effective tools for securing their infrastructure," says Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport. "But while the vision is clear, execution continues to lag behind."

While in last year's survey 77 percent of respondents said that moving to passwordless access was important or very important, this year's findings reveal that the number of respondents using passwords to grant access to infrastructure has actually increased by 10 percent year on year, from 70 percent in 2021 to 80 percent in 2022.

Although 77 percent of respondents have an active initiative to move towards passwordless access and 78 percent have an active initiative to move to biometric authentication, passwords are proving hard to shake off. Notably, 62 percent of respondents cite privacy concerns as a leading challenge when replacing passwords with biometric authentication, while 55 percent point to a lack of devices capable of biometric authentication.

"With architectures growing in complexity, coupled with the rising number of threats and bad actors, DevOps and security engineering leaders cannot afford to delay any longer in turning their plans into actions," adds Kontsevoy. "Secretless, identity-based infrastructure access is the only way forward."

The full report is available from the Teleport site.

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