Ping Identity & Axiad: What the identity-first partnership means for your business

by Jerome Becquart

Axiad’s partnership with Ping Identity was born out of a challenge many of our customers face – they need to broaden their authentication options to transition to complete passwordless, but don’t have integrated solutions to support all their use cases. In a time when many businesses are implementing a Zero Trust strategy but have complex credential requirements for their users, machines, devices, and online interactions, we chose to partner together to take an identity-first approach to passwordless.

Streamlined authentication for every identity

With cybercrime more costly than ever – estimated to cost companies $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 – businesses are scrambling to defend their confidential data and resources with passwordless solutions. Many IT leaders now see multi-factor authentication as a requirement to their Zero Trust security models, with recent studies reporting it can prevent 99.9% of data breaches. However, many users are resistant to multi-factor authentication, often due to a poor user experience and interference in their work productivity. Confusing platforms, slow authentication, or frequent required updates, lead to employees finding workarounds in their systems instead of utilizing the technology. A recent report found that MFA is the policy employees are most likely to not comply with, which makes it essential for enterprises to find and adopt solutions that are convenient for users to use day-to-day.

As IT leaders focus on protecting their users and the MFA adoption issues that come along with it, many haven’t yet considered how to secure their ecosystem’s machines and interactions such as emails and digital documents. Machines and devices on the company network such as phones, laptops, servers, printers, etc. are rapidly increasing, and now outnumber employees by 3 to 1. These identities are all are vulnerable to cyberattacks just like users, but many companies have not implemented an authentication solution for them.

Streamlining user experiences and authenticating machines and interactions are essential steps on the journey to passwordless. Our integration makes that journey simple and fully secure with an identity-first strategy. Let’s take a look at what PingOne and Axiad Cloud offer your IAM infrastructure, and how their integration can impact your cybersecurity.

User-centric IAM from Ping Identity

Ping Identity offers the PingOne Cloud Platform as a comprehensive, standards-based IAM platform. Identity and access management solutions such as PingOne help IT leaders strike the ideal balance between security and experience. The secure platform helps businesses meet compliance requirements while enhancing employee and customer experience.

The Ping Identity solution is designed for hybrid, multi-generational and multi-cloud environments. Providing comprehensive capabilities to support workforce and customer use cases, PingOne helps companies to leverage unified digital identities. The solution gives all users and devices secure access to cloud, mobile, SaaS, and on-premises applications and APIs.

PingOne MFA addresses the issue of usability that many companies face while deploying new authentication solutions. Their mobile authentication is easy for users to deploy and maintain independently, so they will be unlikely to search for workarounds in the system to avoid MFA. This means that IT leaders can secure their workforce with passwordless authentication without sacrificing user experience.

Cloud-Based PKI from Axiad

As businesses look beyond user authentication, they need to find a cloud-based solution that integrates with their current IAM. That’s where Axiad PKI comes in, part of the Axiad Cloud solution. With Axiad Cloud, you can issue certificates for all types of machines, devices, and interactions, so you no longer need to worry about unverified devices or applications on your network. This is invaluable as employees bring work-issued and personal iOS and Android devices to your network. Ensuring all of these are verified prevents hackers from gaining access to your system through a single insecure machine.

Axiad Cloud also offers certificates to sign and encrypt emails and documents. Signing emails enables employees to easily recognize a phishing threat when it lacks a digital signature. For industries that deal with confidential information, such as aerospace and defense, email encryption and document signing are key aspects of their security. These industries also tend to be highly regulated, so PKI technology can help them meet their required security standards.

With Axiad, PKI can be automated and cloud-based. The Axiad Cloud solution takes the management requirements away from IT teams, allowing them to instead focus on their core priorities. On top of PKI, Axiad Cloud provides a single pane of glass for authentication devices such as mobile authenticators like Ping ID, MS Windows Hello For Business or YubiKeys, hardware tokens, biometrics, smart cards, etc. All of these can be managed in one platform with Axiad Cloud, so businesses can scale and grow their credential solutions along with their other cloud-based technologies, without worrying about managing various platforms in silos.

How do they work together?

Axiad’s integration with Ping Identity leverages the SCIM standard to allow customers to extend their IAM infrastructure with plug-and-play connectivity. The addition of new employees, or the modification or deletion of existing users, happens automatically, keeping control in the hands of the ID provider. Ping users can utilize the Axiad Cloud platform in their IAM solution and strengthen their infrastructure with the additional features Axiad provides.

By integrating Ping Identity and Axiad Cloud, customers can now implement an identity-first strategy. If they want to begin their Zero Trust journey, they can take advantage of user-friendly MFA for employees along with secure authentication of machines, devices, and more. These solutions can be easily deployed and managed on the Axiad Cloud platform, enabling businesses to authenticate all their identities on their network with a turnkey, passwordless solution.

About the Author
Jerome Becquart is Axiad’s COO. Jerome has over 20 years of experience in identity and access management solutions, including 15 years at ActivIdentity. Jerome’s management experience includes roles in operational management, sales management, professional services, product and solution marketing, engineering, and technical support. After the acquisition of ActivIdentity by HID Global in 2010, Jerome served as general manager of the HID Identity Assurance business unit. He chaired the Global Platform Government Task Force for three years, and served on the board of directors of this Industry organization.