At its recent Ignite conference, Microsoft plugged Cortana as a corporate worker, now that companies are moving towards interacting with their tech through voice, The Register says. Corporate Vice President of Microsoft, Javier Soltero, who works directly with Cortana solutions, said that interacting with technology via voice has become familiar to humans similar to the way cell phones have.
The vouch for Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant that uses voice command technology, comes at a time when Bill Gates’ 2004 prediction – that passwords are phasing out – is coming true. As a result, an “end to the era of passwords” was declared, The Register reports.
However, this doesn’t mean that passwords are permanently leaving; in Microsoft’s case, it means that the tech giant supports password-free sign-ins to Azure Active Directory-connected apps via Microsoft Authenticator. “Instead of a password, users can now employ multi-factor authentication that combines a phone number with a fingerprint, face or PIN,” The Register says.
The upside to ditching passwords and opting for multifaceted logins is that the risk of a data breach reduces up to 99.9 percent, Rob Lefferts, the corporate vice president of program management and security compliance for Microsoft, told The Register.
What decision makers should keep in mind:
While the move to voice-activated PINs are on the rise, it doesn’t necessarily mean that data is safer. To date, data breaches are still happening, and there is still no such things as an airtight security system. Just last year alone, over 550 separate data breaches took place, affecting millions of U.S. citizens.
As a result, even if decision makers opt for a solution like Cortana, they should still consider investing in cybersecurity protection. Refreshing and/or establishing a cybersecurity strategy for how to handle an attack for before (to prevent), during, and after, is a good idea, too. No matter how secure a company claims their database is, there are always hackers planning for the next break in; with data breaches, it’s not a matter of if one will happen – it’s when one will happen.
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At the same time as the “Photoshop for voice” tools are coming out? Great idea…