Passwordless authentication to improve security, user experience in 2023: SecureAuth CEO

Paul Trulove became SecureAuth’s CEO almost a year ago. Over the course of 2022, the company achieved several milestones in passwordless authentication. As the year comes to a close, Trulove discussed these achievements with Biometric Update in an email interview.

“We worked to define our vision for next-generation authentication, a vision that is focused on making it easier and more secure for users to gain access to the wide range of devices, applications, and data they use on a daily basis at work or as consumers,” Trulove says.

According to the executive, 2022 was also an important year for the team at SecureAuth, as the company finished integrating Acceptto following its acquisition late in 2021, and worked to redefine the culture of teams across the world.

“As part of this process, we recommitted to a remote work environment,” Trulove explains, “but found new ways to leverage our offices in Irvine, CA and Buenos Aires, Argentina, to build and reinforce relationships between team members.”

Talking about passwordless authentication, the SecureAuth CEO mentions a study conducted by the company earlier in the year showing that customers are increasingly frustrated with passwords.

“Enterprise organizations have been forced to rapidly adopt new authentication methods due to Covid and moving to accommodate remote workforces on a permanent basis,” Trulove explains.

The executive adds that more vigorous enforcement at the endpoint for employees and customers is now critical.

“As growing data breach and fraud concerns increase, companies are considering new authentication methods to try and stay ahead of the risks. All of this helps support the adoption of passwordless, continuous authentication.”

Passwordless to drive employee experience

In addition, Trulove believes an increasing number of companies are shifting to passwordless to improve the employee experience.

“One of the main areas employees continue to highlight as an area for improvement is authentication. In an increasingly digital workplace, users can be asked to authenticate into a wide range of applications and data repositories dozens of times per day.”

Trulove adds that SecureAuth is addressing these challenges by removing the risk of inappropriate access and improving the authentication experience for end users.

“Today’s threat landscape requires more than a simple binary approach to authentication.”

To this end, Trulove says Arculix’s patented technology embeds behavioral models that continuously learn what genuine user activity looks like.

“At the same time, this intelligence is used to determine if authentication can be suppressed completely if there is no threat. This enables a passwordless experience while also reducing the friction of constant MFA prompts inflicting pain on end users.”

Trulove says that since its launch in June, the Arculix platform has been received by current customers very positively.

“This is in part due to the ability to leverage Arculix in conjunction with an existing SecureAuth deployment,” Trulove says.

“Instead of having to migrate to a new platform, the Arculix user experience can interact with the existing SecureAuth platform. This is also true for new customers where another identity provider is in use.”

Expanding partnerships

In October, Grupo TRC and SDG Corporation joined the SecureAuth Partner Program.

“We have [also] added Integral Partners and SystemDomain to our partner program,” Trulove says.

Moving forward, the CEO explains that SecureAuth will adjust the program to offer more incentives to an unnamed partner responsible for building sales and improving implementation capacity.

“We will couple this with a new and expanded onboarding and training program to make sure partners are fully enabled to leverage the comprehensive capabilities of Arculix.”

In a further, non-sales partnership, SecureAuth joined the Identity Defined Security Alliance last month.

“We firmly believe that organizations can get better security while providing frictionless user experience by using passwordless continuous authentication,” Trulove says, commenting on the move.

“IDSA is one of the key industry organizations supporting this mission. In addition, we look to support independent associations like IDSA that are focused on IAM to educate the overall community on how the environment is evolving.”

With an expanding partner ecosystem and a base of potential customers with a maturing understanding of the importance of improving authentication, Trulove sees major opportunity ahead for SecureAuth and the broader industry in 2023.

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  passwordless authentication  |  SecureAuth  |  user experience