Although this method works pretty well, Microsoft has put a lot of resources into improving the end-user experience even further. Nowadays, most enterprise organization end users still use a username and password (usually Active Directory-based) combined with two-factor authentication to access cloud services and on-premises systems. On top of that, organizations started to deploy two-factor solutions in order to optimize the security further. In addition, when the demand for being able to connect to internal corporate systems over the Internet saw the light of day, perimeter networks (aka DMZ) and virtual private network (VPN) solutions became popular. The way the systems (as they were called back then) were secured was through the use of so-called security boundaries such as firewalls. All the way back to when end users primarily worked through a session in an old-school mainframe up until Active Directory, this has pretty much been the case.

For decades, we have accessed IT systems using a set of credentials consisting of a username and a password.

Microsoft authenticator for windows 10