You’re here because you’re interested in getting identity and security into your app. You need registration and login pages to get users onto your platform. Obviously, they’ll also need a way to log out. And maybe transfer to another domain while logged into the same profile. Oh, and they’ll also want to be able to sign in with their social media accounts. And, perhaps most importantly, it all needs to be secure.

Identity and security are hard topics, and there’s a lot to keep track of, including constantly evolving security updates and best practices. You need a complete solution that can support your unique needs, but also one you can trust with the security and customer experience of your app. Ping Identity prides itself on being an industry leader, and the industry’s trusted analysts agree. KuppingerCole has named us a leader in customer IAM for three years running, and Gartner also named us a leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management.

Most recently, KuppingerCole, one of the major analyst firms, named Ping Identity a leader in consumer authentication. In fact, Ping Identity was selected as a leader in all four sections: Overall Leadership, Product Leadership, Innovation Leadership and Market Leadership.

So if you’re looking for an API-first solution for login, registration, self-service, MFA and more for your app, who are you going to go with? As KuppingerCole says, “Ping Identity offers full functionality to customers regardless of deployment model.”

What Makes a Good Consumer Authentication Solution?

The 2019 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Consumer Authentication provides an in-depth look at the available solutions. Their evaluation criteria included overall functionality and useability, internal product/service security, size of the company, number of tenants/customers and end users, number of developers, partner ecosystem and licensing models, as well as specific features such as APIs.

But what does this mean for you? Essentially, if you’re looking for the best solution to integrate into your app, KuppingerCole has already done some of the heavy lifting for you by identifying the top vendors in the space and evaluating them based on standard criteria. Their report can help you fast track your vendor evaluation process and also show you why Ping Identity’s solutions are so highly regarded.

KuppingerCole calls out some features that are particularly important when evaluating a consumer authentication vendor and their solutions. Let’s take a look at a few that might be relevant for your project.

APIs

APIs allow you to make use of the work someone else has already done and implement a feature instantly. It’s faster to make a call to a service that will handle the logic for you than to write your own logic. But you want to be sure to call on a service that you trust for your identity security.

You can imagine how much work it would take to validate a user’s password safely, securely and correctly. Rather than build out that capability yourself, make an API call and wait for the results. That’s just a single basic example of how PingOne for Customers APIs can simplify identity security with many more that you’re likely to run across in building any consumer app.

Authenticators

Authenticators are the means used to confirm the identity of a user; in other words, it’s to sign someone in. Offering different methods of signing in and the ability to configure authentication policies is critical for your app. Some identity security solutions will support native mobile biometrics, such as FaceID, while others may support mobile push notifications or email/phone one-time passcodes. 

PingOne for Customers supports all of the common authenticators, as well as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for extra security when needed. Templates and different methods of delivery make it easy to customize any messaging for your needs.

Mobile SDK

Secure SDKs and sample code reduce the hassle of creating an app from scratch. You can call convenience and utility methods to implement a security feature more easily. Or you can call methods that offer more in-depth control over the authentication process. You can even use an entire app as the skeleton for your own and modify as necessary.

SDKs and sample code are great, but if they aren’t up to snuff in terms of security, it’s too risky to rely on them for your app. Working with a consumer authentication leader will ensure the code is of good quality and can meet the security standards of your organization. For example, the PingOne for Customers Mobile Android and iOS samples allows you to integrate MFA into your native mobile apps, so you can leverage Ping Identity’s expertise in MFA technology without having to figure out how to build it yourself.

Social Login

Social login is a great way to make signing into your app more convenient for your users. Instead of making them create a new account with a new password (because reusing old passwords is unsafe) that they might forget or store in an insecure place, they can just use one of their social accounts, such as Facebook, to sign in. PingOne for Customers makes it easy to configure a social login option for your customers.

PingOne for Customers is your Customer IAM Solution

All of these features are important for one simple reason: you want to build a secure app that your consumers enjoy using. But you also need it to be easy for you to build, update and customize.

PingOne for Customers was built to be API-first. Even our admin console’s GUI, which you can access through a browser, is entirely dependent on our API. All of the cool stuff you can do in the admin console can easily be done by API calls. 

Another advantage of PingOne for Customers is that it’s built on identity standards like OAuth and SAML. The benefit here is that it allows for portability. If two people are coding under the same structure and rules, it’s easier to take one person’s code and integrate into the other’s code, or vice versa.

We’ve also got everything you need to get up to speed quickly. Check out our API documentation, developer community and even YouTube playlists to find answers to all your questions.

In their evaluation of Ping Identity, KuppingerCole says, “Ping Identity products and services are mature and highly capable and should be considered for consumer authentication RFPs, particularly for companies that need customizability.”

But don’t just take their word for it—come try it out with a free trial of PingOne for Customers.