Yubico’s Yubikey 5C NFC is enabled for USB-C as well as wireless NFC connectivity to desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.
Yubico
Until now, Yubikey-as-a-Service — Yubico’s provisioning and delivery offering — was available only in a handful of countries, due primarily to various local logistics and delivery challenges.
Today, the company announced that it has largely overcome those challenges, that it is more than doubling its global reach, and that it now offers the service in 175 countries and 24 territories, including all countries in the EU.
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Under the brand name Yubikey, Yubico offers a series of FIDO Alliance-compliant roaming authenticators that deliver hardware-based end-user authentication for applications and websites.
For consumers, the company’s authenticators prevent anyone from signing into password managers and other sensitive applications unless a YubiKey is physically available to them. When businesses and enterprises issue Yubikeys — or competing offerings such as Google’s Titan — to all employees, the roaming authenticators are physically required when signing into any business-approved applications, websites, and single sign-on infrastructures such as Okta’s enterprise SSO ID provider offerings and Microsoft Entra ID.
In business settings, the process of provisioning, issuing, and managing all roaming authenticators involves a number of logistical challenges that the company’s Yubikey-as-a-Service is designed to address.
For example, what happens when new remote employees go through the onboarding process and need to be issued a Yubikey that’s pre-provisioned for all the enterprise apps and sites that they need access to? Or, what if an existing employee is visiting customers in another country, loses their roaming authenticator, and cannot access email or other systems remotely until a new key is sent to them?
With Yubikey-as-a-Service, IT personnel can visit their Yubico-provided portal to not only pre-configure those Yubikeys but also have Yubico deliver them to any employee, almost anywhere in the world. Prior to today’s announcement, many parts of the world had employees and business points of presence that were out of the service’s reach, which in turn resulted in timely issuance and delivery friction.
“Our enterprise customers might tell us they want 10,000 Yubikeys, and some number of them have to be the 5 NFC USB-A-enabled model, while others have to be the 5C NFC model enabled for USB-C, and so on,” Yubico senior vice president of product Jeff Wallace told ZDNET. “These choices are based on what laptops, desktops, or even phones the employees are using.”
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According to Wallace, Yubikey-as-a-Service is a hardware subscription service that gives businesses the flexibility to manage exactly what has to be provisioned to each employee and to be able to deliver the correctly configured and provisioned Yubikey to any of those employees on demand.
“For departing employees, it also enables businesses to remotely deprovision keys, and we would replace them at no charge as part of the subscription service,” said Wallace.
The expanded global reach of Yubikey-as-a-Service is available starting today and includes Yubico’s YubiEnterprise Delivery service and the company’s Yubico Enrollment Suite.
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