Two-factor authentication or multifactor authentication is making a huge push over the past couple of years, but it’s been around for a while. The reason it’s making such a big push here lately is because Microsoft is starting to push that out to their Office 365 systems, which all of our clients use. A lot of businesses use it at all different sizes. All the school districts use it. It’s a big player in the industry, and they’re not requiring it yet, but they’re highly suggesting it. And it’s going to be a requirement, I think, from what we’re reading and the way the industry is going.

It’s a bit of a pain right now to set up. I think it’ll get easier as they go through it. You typically have to download a Microsoft authenticator to your phone or some kind of mobile device. And when you go to log into your email or your cloud server, you put in your login ID, your password, and it prompts you on your phone and asks you, “Are you trying to log in?” And all you have to do is hit yes or no, or approve or deny.

In fact, we’re actually working on a document right now. We’re going to send to all of our clients with a recommendation to enable multifactor authentication on their Office 365 accounts. And if they don’t want to do it, we’re going to make them sign off on a piece of paper that they refused. And that if there are any breaches caused by this, that we determine that are caused by them not having the MFA enabled, that will be outside the scope of their contract. It’s getting to be that serious. We have plenty of stories where if a client had multifactor authentication enable, it would have saved them a lot of time, hassle, and money.

Sometimes you get that notification, and you’re you’re you are trying to buy something. It doesn’t go through, and you get the text or the email that says, “We saw this charge. Are you, you’re trying to buy this?” Well, okay, it’s approved, but you may have to put the charge back through and maybe call them back.

But I’m glad they do that, obviously, for the instances when you say, “No, I didn’t charge a sombrero in Mexico City!”

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Kelly Herrod, the founder and CEO of Herrod Technology, started the company in 2000 to provide simple IT solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. His personal approach, over 30 years experience and his ability to simplify IT sets him apart in the IT industry.

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