Multi-factor authentication set to be a $10bn market by 2020

Analyst predicts juicy growth ahead for 2FA, 3FA, 4FA and 5FA techniques

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) will be a $10bn (£5.8bn) market by the beginning of the next decade following a period of lightning growth, according to one analyst.

Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the market for MFA will swell at a compound annual growth rate of 19.67 per cent to reach $10.75bn by 2020.

Two-factor authentication currently accounts for 90 per cent of the market, the analyst said, with authentication models involving three or more factors less common.

The use of four- and five-factor authentication models – which include using smart cards with PINs and more than one type of biometric technology such as face recognition – are restricted to high-cost projects in defence, research and government-based applications, MarketsandMarkets noted.

North America is currently the biggest market for MFA overall, followed by Europe and APAC, the analyst added.

MFA is increasingly getting deployed at all the security checkpoints in airports and in verticals such as retail and banking, according to MarketsandMarkets.

"MFA technology is slowly spreading across all the industries wherever security is the prime concern," it said.

Based on CRN's own back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, the numbers MarketsandMarkets' gave suggest it thinks the multi-factor authentication market will be worth almost $3.5bn this year.

Gartner pegged the size of the user authentication market in 2012 at about $2bn, although stressed there could be a large margin of error in its estimate due partly to the long tail of about 200 vendors not included in its research. It believes the market is growing at about 15 per cent year on year.

Gartner's last magic quadrant into the market pinpointed Safenet, RSA, Gemalto, Vasco, CA and Technology Nexus as the market leaders.