A study from the FIDO Alliance and HID finds that enterprises are markedly more confident about their identity security than their own results justify, with many still leaning on passwords and fragmented access systems even as they claim tight control. The survey of 500 IT and cybersecurity decision-makers, released at the Identiverse conference, frames identity not as a pure authentication problem but as a governance one spanning physical and digital access.
The confidence gap is the headline finding. Ninety-four percent of organizations said they could revoke all of a departing employee’s physical and digital access within 24 hours, yet 35 percent admitted they had actually experienced failures or delays in doing so over the past two years, and 70 percent reported at least one identity-related security incident. The distance between what organizations believe they can do and what has happened to them is the study’s central warning.
Underlying that gap is sprawl. Fifty-nine percent of organizations manage three or more separate credential or authentication systems, and 58 percent said digital identity management had grown more complex over the past two years. Ownership is split as well, with only half reporting unified accountability for physical and digital identity and fewer than half holding consolidated budget control, leaving the two halves of access governance to be managed by different teams with different tools.
Passkeys show the same pattern of intent outrunning execution. The study found 93 percent of organizations somewhere on the passkey adoption journey, but only 13 percent had deployed passkeys at scale, with reducing phishing risk cited as the leading motivation. “The story in this data isn’t about awareness, it’s about execution,” said Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the FIDO Alliance, pointing to the distance between the 93 percent on the passkey journey and the 13 percent that have deployed at scale.
The survey covered organizations of 150 or more employees across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, spanning finance, healthcare, public sector, manufacturing, and technology. “Identity security is no longer just an authentication challenge; it is an enterprise governance challenge,” said Sean Dyon, Vice President of the Authentication Business Unit at HID, the framing that ties the physical and digital sides together. The findings echo a broader picture in which enterprise passkey adoption is climbing while full deployment lags, and in which vendors are pushing unified physical and digital access platforms to close the fragmentation the study describes.
The FIDO Alliance and HID published the study at Identiverse, presenting it as a measure of how far enterprise identity practice trails enterprise identity confidence.
Sources: FIDO Alliance
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
