The 2024 State of the Security Industry Report from HID Global studies trends and changes in the security industry. This year six major themes emerged surrounding mobile identity, multi-factor authentication, biometrics, AI, and sustainability.

The research includes data from more than 2,500 individuals – partners, end users, and security/IT personnel – from around the globe. Respondents cover a range of responsibilities, organization sizes, and industries.

Within five years, end users expect that 80% of organizations will deploy mobile IDs and industry players expect that 94% of their customers will have gone mobile.

Here’s a rundown of this year’s six themes:

Mobile identity ubiquitous in the next five years

By 2029, end users expect that 80% of organizations will deploy mobile IDs. Industry partners are even more confident, predicting that 94% of their customers will have deployed the new credentials.

Multi-Factor Authentication is widespread, Zero Trust slow but growing

More than 83% of end users say their organization currently uses Multi-Factor Authentication to protect against weak passwords. This is a first step toward Zero Trust, a security approach that strengthens all access controls to ‘never trust, always verify’ both internal and external users.

Survey results suggest that Zero Trust is already in place at16% of organizations with 100,000+ employees and 14% of those between 5,000 and 10,000 employees.

Sustainability drives business decisions

Sustainability continues to be a strong business priority. End users and partners rate it four on a one-to-five scale. Its importance has grown over the past year, with three-quarters of end users and 80% of partners reporting increased customer interest. A shift to cloud-based solutions and mobile devices are key strategies to reach sustainability goals.

Biometrics experience strong momentum

In this year’s survey, 40% of installers and integrators said a subset of their customers are using fingerprint or palm print and 30% said some are using facial recognition. An additional 8% plan to test or implement some form of biometrics in the next year and 22% plan to do so in the next three to five years. Half of all respondents cited biometrics as a top interest.

Identity management in the cloud

Nearly half of end users are moving to cloud-based identity management, with one-quarter already using it and another quarter in the implementation process. Not surprisingly, the report found that adoption is slowed by reliance on existing on-prem equipment (28%) and lack of budget (24%).

The rise of artificial intelligence for analytics use cases

As a first-step with AI in security and identity management, organizations are beginning to leverage data analytics and AI in support of actionable outcomes. 35% of end users say they will be testing or implementing some AI capability in the next three to five years.

Check out the full report for some interesting stats on the topics like the rate of adoption for mobile IDs and the deployment rates for multi-factor authentication.

DOWNLOAD REPORT