"With fingerprint readers being built into these devices, it should come as no big surprise that the most common place for biometric authentication in the workplace is on smartphones. In fact, 46% of organizations are using biometric authentication tech on smartphones, which may be influenced by employees bringing their own mobile devices for work purposes," the company said. "Additionally, 25% of organizations report using biometric authentication tech on laptops, while 22% use it on tablets, and 17% use it on time clock systems (popular in manufacturing) to verify the identity of employees."

However, credit unions and other workplaces that are lagging in biometric use might have some support from an unlikely source — the IT team.

Although Spiceworks found that most IT professionals think biometric authentication is more secure than text-based passwords, PIN numbers or other typical forms of authentication, only 10% said they think biometric authentication should be the only form of authentication.

Much of the distrust could be due to a lack of transparency from vendors around security risks. The survey found that 65% of IT professionals believe there's not enough transparency about the vulnerabilities of biometric systems, and 63% think there needs to be more transparency about what vendors are doing with all that biometric data. Most said they also needed more information about where vendors store biometric data.

Risks around false positives, compromised or replicated identifiers and a lack of standards were also on the minds of at least half of the respondents in the survey.

Cost was a big issue for IT professionals, too — 67% said it was the largest barrier to adopting biometric authentication — but 59% also worried about reliability, 47% worried about systems upgrade requirements and 42% were concerned about how to manage and store biometric data.

"Also, 42% of IT pros believe employee pushback is a barrier to adoption, which could be influenced by privacy concerns and resistance to change," the company added.

"Many IT professionals aren't convinced biometrics can serve as a secure and reliable replacement for the standard username and password combo," Spiceworks Senior Technology Analyst Peter Tsai said. "Unless technology vendors can address the security issues and privacy concerns associated with biometrics, the technology will likely be used side-by-side in the workplace with traditional passwords or as a secondary authentication factor for the foreseeable future."

Spiceworks conducted the survey in February and included 492 respondents who were IT professionals from North America and Europe. Other findings included:

• 5% of organizations are using use hand geometry recognition
• 3% use iris-scanning technology
• 2% use voice recognition
• 2% use palm-vein recognition