New biometric multi-factor authentication, and Dynamic Perimeter geofencing are the two new security capabilities.

Today, identity provider SecureAuth has announced upgrades to their SecureAuth Identity Platform, their hybrid access management solution which has been rebranded from SecureAuth IdP. They include new flexibility in how customer can deploy it, new biometric and geofencing capabilities, and a new emphasis on Intelligent Identity Cloud, a cloud-based service which has been there before, but never emphasized, and which is slated to be expanded significantly going forward.

SecureAuth plays in the Identity and Access Management space, with a particular focus on the high end of the market.

“We focus at the high end of the enterprise which has massively distributed and very complex hybrid environments,” said Robert Humphrey, SecureAuth’s CMO. “We compete with Ping and Okta in particular. However, in more complex environments, identity-as-a-service isn’t always a good fit. We also are different from other players like Auth0 who go after the developer. We sell to more of the end user and security professional. The CISO is generally in our sales cycle.”

While SecureAuth is sold into the midmarket as well, that’s purely a channel play.

“The midmarket is where our partners sell exclusively,” Humphrey said. “We don’t sell there ourselves.”

A key element of the updates to the platform involve enhancing its useability in the enterprise.

“Where we really play well is in the hybrid complex enterprise, but we are introducing new tools associated with hybrid that improve the management experience,” Humphrey stated. “Through a single console, we can manage in a mixed environment, and tie it all together.”

One net-new capability here is what SecureAuth calls freedom of deployment – the ability to subscribe to the product as a hosted service, as well as the ability to change the deployment model if needs change.

“Before, someone could run us in the cloud, but we were not a cloud service provider,” Humphrey said. “With this release, a customer can now subscribe to the product as a service –  deployment freedom. If you want to license it to run on-prem, you can, or if you want us to run it, we will. That part is new.”

Another aspect, which is not new ,is the SecureAuth Intelligent Identity Cloud, a cloud-based service which delivers advanced security, user experience, analytics, administration and extensibility functionality out-of-the-box. While it is not new, it has not been promoted before, and was hidden under the covers. The plan is to expand it significantly going forward.

“Intelligent Identity Cloud has been an embedded capability in the past,” Humphrey said. “We didn’t even market it. It was something that was just in the platform. We are now separating it and calling it out as part of our deployment capability. We are also calling out its services capabilities to customers who use competitors’ predicts like Okta and Ping.” The SecureAuth Intelligent Identity Cloud will be available to all Identity Platform customers with active support agreements

Today, it’s not sold as a separate product, but that will change over time.

“Over the coming quarters, we will start to offer it as a separate platform,” Humphrey indicated. “As we add new capabilities, they will become additional services.”

Updates to the administrative interface are designed to increase simplicity in the hybrid environment. This includes new Identity security intelligence, pre-populated reports that let administrators to see key metrics at a glance. In addition, new reusable adaptive authentication objects accelerate the creation and administration of authentication experiences. This simplifies set up and ongoing administration, and delivers a more consistent experience for workforce, partner, and customer identities.

“Historically, we have been focused on internal employee identity,” Humphrey said. “We have expanded that, broadening out what we are doing in the customer identity market. The strategic value of identity becomes even bigger in a customer identity play.”

“SecureAuth is great at making the hard things easy, but now we make the easier things even easier with these administrative enhancements and their impact on workflows,” said  Darryl Martin, SecureAuth’s VP of Channel & Strategy. They can now manage customer success with one interface. We can go even deeper with our security analytics.”

“We have always been known for our deep security capabilities – we have over 30 – and now we have added two brand new ones,” Humphrey said. “One is our own biometric multi-factor authentication for mobile devices, which came from our work in health care, education and government.”

The other newly developed security addition is Dynamic Perimeter. This reduces authentication disruptions for users who regularly move about in a campus-like environment after they have successfully authenticated.

“You have traditionally had to check back in if you move around in campus environments, going from building to building with different Wi-Fi circuits,” Humphrey said. “Dynamic perimeter lets the admin draw a broader line around a perimeter so they won’t have to check back in, as long as they stay inside the perimeter. This is a new significant capability, which will be useful in environments like military bases.”

“Our partners are excited about our new depth in security, as well as how easy it is to manage,” Martin said.

The channel is a large and growing component of SecureAuth’s business.

“In the four and a half years that I have been here, the channel has gone from 43 per cent of our business to 78 per cent,’ Martin noted. “The channel has become a huge player for us.”

They have about 40 active partners, which include five major ones like Optiv and FIshtech who are very security focused, as well as key regional partners. As we move into more of a customer identity discussion and beyond just a security play we are looking more at integrators as well.

The SecureAuth Identity Platform is now available to early access customers, and will be rolled out generally in early of Q3 2019.