Steven Pieterse, Metisware

The second-most popular Microsoft application after Teams, with nearly 24 million downloads as of the fourth quarter of 2023, is Microsoft Authenticator. The application is available on mobile devices and provides an extra layer of multifactor authentication (MFA) for organisations. Offering a variety of authentication methods that include time-based codes and push notifications, Microsoft Authenticator is designed for the enterprise. We talk to Steven Pieterse, CEO of Metisware, and Richard Frost, CISO at Armata, about why they made the move to Microsoft Authenticator to protect their people and business.

“The only way to defend access to a cloud based architecture is with some form of password or MFA, especially now with people brute-forcing the Microsoft 365 accounts to try to guess the password,” says Frost. “Authenticator was our first choice as it’s part of the package, but also because we could customise it.”