The more options you have, the more likely you are to be able to accommodate the needs of your users.

This is why it is important to have a variety of options for MFA. The way people use this technology is diverse and varied, as is their comfort level with it. These people have varying levels of access to personal and institutional technology. The reality is that an institution like Dalhousie has an enormously diverse crowd of people affiliated with it. The users of these devices might be an eighteen year old freshmen, or an octogenarian professor emeritus. I have had to help people with MFA who own every possible permutation of computer, tablet and cellphone, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.

In other cases, they don't have a phone number, or they don't have a phone number that they can use for MFA. In other cases, they don't own a phone, or they don't have a phone that supports the app. In some cases people struggle to get MFA apps to work on their phone. Therefore, it is important to have a backup MFA method. If you have a backup MFA method, you can use that to authenticate to your account, and then reset your MFA method to something else.

You will need to contact the IT Service Desk to have your MFA reset.

If your only MFA method is your cellphone, and you lose your phone, the battery runs completely dead, or it won't turn on for whatever reason, you will not be able to authenticate to your account. With the approaching deadline for MFA, I thought it might be a good idea to write a post about it and share some of the things I've learned. While it is become a common security tool in industry, it has not been as common in a university setting. One of the realities of implementing Multi-factor authentication is that it can be a bit of a pain for users.

Winauth