(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Giving IT managers better control over who accesses corporate information over the Internet and in cloud-based applications, Comodo (www.comodo.com) has added another form of identification besides passwords to user logins for Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) SharePoint and Outlook Web Access applications.
Comodo’s Two-factor Authentication for Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook Web Access helps secure small companies and promote security best-practices, according to Comodo’s Thursday announcement. Comodo has released a free and enterprise versions of Two-factor Authentication, which are both wizard-driven, making installation on any network without client or application-side development easy.
“If you want to make SharePoint and Outlook Web Access available via the Internet — you have to secure it, and two-factor authentication is the best way to do it,” Comodo chief executive officer Melih Abdulhayoglu said in a statement. “[O]nce you want to access the services from outside of your company’s local network, security becomes an issue. To ensure security, you must either use a VPN connection, which may be costly and hard to manage, or securely authenticate the user. Leaving it unsecure can result in the information being publicly accessible.”
The industry standard for verifying online financial users, two-factor authentication seamlessly “double-checks” the identity of users logging on to SharePoint and Outlook Web Access by requiring another form of identification besides the user’s password.
In addition to passwords, Comodo’s free version of its Two-Factor Authentication solution can be configured to use cookies, security questions, or one-time passwords using an alternate communication such as email or SMS. The enterprise version offers customers the option of replacing cookies with client certificates.
