Passwordless technology, which SecureAuth and most of the security industry see as an inevitable response to customer requests, will be available from SecureAuth through its new Arculix platform by the end of August.

Irvine CA-based IAM [identity and management] provider SecureAuth is announcing the forthcoming availability of a brand new platform, Arculix, which will be focused on passwordless identity and will provide next generation identity and access management, strong authentication, and advanced policy orchestration. SecureAuth plans to make Arculix generally available at the end of August.

“The industry in general is moving away from passwords,” said Paul Trulove,  SecureAuth’s CEO. “It is evaluating passwords, and you will eventually see passwordless becoming dominant. Our original SecureAuth product line was originally designed as an on-prem based system with passwords, although it has since been upgraded to run in the cloud.”

The new Arculix platform, on the other hand, was designed as a built-in-the-cloud product, and is powered by a patented behavioral modeling that is driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning technology based on 47 patents.

“It was designed to run as a SaaS application, although it can be used hybrid or simply in an on-prem data centre, if the customer wants it that way,” Trulove said.

The Arculix technology combines desktop login, mobile, and SSO user experiences into a single, seamless, passwordless system, and is integrated with a large set of multi-factor authentication methods.

“This first generation of Arcuilix is focused on passwordless, and it is designed to be leveraged with other identity solutions like Okta or Microsoft to let it build out a broader identity ecosystem,” Trulove noted. “Most large enterprise organizations use multiple identity providers. We can sit on top and provide a seamless expertise. That’s particularly of use for companies that grew up mainly through an M&A acquisition strategy.”

Arculix sees the most logical target audience for this as large organizations

“Our primary market today is focused on the large enterprise,” Trulove said. “The company once did have more of a focus on smaller organizations, but when I came on board [in early 2022] we moved it up from smaller enterprises to larger ones. Larger enterprises are where the biggest gaps exist, although that doesn’t mean that there aren’t smaller organizations who can also benefit from what we do.” Banks, health insurance and higher education all provide multiple important customers, although Trulove pointed out that they are also seeing a real opportunity in retail.

Trulove said that while they encounter objections to passwordless that go beyond the cost of a new platform, they are not that difficult to overcome.

“One is that they don’t understand what passwordless truly entails,” he stated. “They are starting to better research and understand it, and come to the conclusion, which is not always clear at the start, that removing the username and password as a primary way of security actually makes you more secure. In addition, they need to understand how it can help improve things without having to replace everything. One large customer we are talking to is looking at passwordless through the lens of employee recruitment and retention. Most employees don’t like passwords, so removing them makes employees happier and more productive.”

While many products which are displaced by a more advanced version remain on the market to serve different use cases or more value-conscious buyers, Trulove does not really think that will be the case here.

“I think the original platform will fade over time,” he said. “I describe the transition around these platforms as a dimmer switch, not a light switch, that you regularly turn on and off. Over time we believe that as customers reduce the number of apps, the old platform will be eventually turned off. Arculix just has some many other advantages to the customer. It will ease administration and ease onboarding for customers, along with providing a frictionless experience. That’s important to the customer, to make improvements in reducing administration. That’s an area where we are making investments as part of the Arculix vision.”