Ping named a Leader in 2022 Forrester CIAM Wave

A customer identity and authentication management (CIAM) platform is the backbone of customer-facing services and applications, supporting both acquisition and retention. If a customer can’t checkout as a guest, register for an account, or just log in, there is a high likelihood you’ll never see them again. Therefore, it must be invisible to users so they can access the services they came to use instead of getting stuck on login or registration forms. Forrester evaluated 13 different vendors in the CIAM space across 22 criteria and ranked them based on their current offering, strategy, and market presence in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Identity and Access Management 2022 report. Ping Identity has ranked as a Leader.

1. Risk-based authentication: Quickly becoming a must-have for CIAM. In the Forrester report, Ping Identity received the highest possible score in the risk-based authentication criterion. According to the report, Ping Identity’s “Risk-based authentication scoring is flexible, and canned integration with business systems and fraud management solutions also shines.” In a world where breaches are a regular occurrence and both new account fraud and account takeovers are a reality, risk-based authentication is a good way to ensure a user is whom they say they are by using contextual signals and only adding the friction of MFA requests when risk is high. Additionally, risk-based authentication establishes a strong foundation as a critical step on the journey to passwordless by getting rid of insecure and often forgotten passwords.

 

2. Scalability: Solutions must carry on under sustained loads. It’s easy for a CIAM platform to work under normal conditions, but how well does it perform under extreme conditions? Scale is an easy word for vendors to claim in marketing, but Ping proves it. Take for example a large leading manufacturer of televisions that uses the PingOne platform. During the 2022 Super Bowl, business spiked as they processed 56,000 transactions per second, with 90% of those transactions being completed in under 0.1ms. That peak load continued as viewers went from watching the Super Bowl to the Winter Olympics.

 

3. Data Orchestration: While orchestration is nothing new to the IT world, it is becoming a core element of the identity fabric. In short, it’s used to quickly connect disparate systems, whether that’s multiple identity services from different vendors or business systems with marketing platforms, it (mostly) eliminates the need for custom scripts and integrations. PingOne DaVinci uses a drag-and-drop canvas that includes hundreds of connectors with the most popular software to connect apps and services across hybrid environments. DaVinci is unique in that it has an anti-lock-in approach to orchestration. You can use Ping’s identity services, competitor services, or integrate with other third-party risk, fraud, and other services to create and optimize user journeys.

Getting past the executive summary, let’s take a look at a few other elements that Forrester has identified within the CIAM Wave:

• Fraud detection is a differentiator: It’s an important part of the customer experience. Even before a customer has authenticated, a robust CIAM platform should include fraud detection to identify fraudulent activity, whether it’s looking for bot behavior, stolen credentials, or as mentioned above, new account fraud. We use various forms of machine learning and signatures to detect such activity, and bring it all together in a centralized decisioning hub, PingOne Authorize. Or, as stated above, you can leverage DaVinci to plug in other fraud services you’re already using.

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• Orchestration goes mainstream: I called it out above, however, its importance cannot be understated. Reading through the report, we believe that Forrester sees the value of orchestration solutions, and specifically how it simplifies the numerous and complex customer journeys. Even something as simple as new user registration can be cumbersome and complex behind the scenes. Orchestration makes this drag-and-drop simple. As Forrester notes “Its technology acquisition of Singular Key (now called DaVinci), a low-/no-code IAM workflow and orchestration vendor, indicates that Ping is serious about CIAM. And we are. We have been investing heavily in our marketplace with hundreds of connectors to integrate with existing services, and flow templates to act as starting points to get identity and customer experiences done right. If there are problems with any of your services, you can easily spot exactly where they occur in the journey and DaVinci’s anti-lock-in approach ensures that you aren’t limited to a single vendor.

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• Support for A/B testing: It’s difficult to know which customer journey will yield the best results. Should you implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts each time a user logs in to their account, or should you only do it when they are logging in from a different location, a new device, or some other key piece of telemetry? Does a new fraud vendor you’ve just added create more friction than they’re worth? Our customers tell us the ability to use DaVinci to A/B test user experiences, such as determining whether to prompt for MFA, is a key reason they purchase. In fact, using DaVinci a large retailer performed A/B testing on their user journey and was able to significantly increase sales conversion by extending user sessions from one day to one year! Simultaneously they successfully kept out bots and bad actors by integrating fraud prevention.

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• Identity Verification grows in importance: As customers interact with businesses more online there is a need to be able to verify they are in fact who they say they are to reduce the possibility of new account opening fraud. Often referred to as identity proofing, it generally includes physical identity document verification, such as scanning a driver's license, as well as digital document verification such as a mobile driver's license or national digital identification card. Whether it’s physical or digital, PingOne Verify has it covered. Identity verification services are the backbone of future decentralized identity solutions.

As we look to the near future, Ping will be focused on three key areas:

1. A marketplace for connectors and workflows. As mentioned above this already exists, however, we will be building significantly more connectors for DaVinci that include integration with even more systems—from business intelligence and customer relationship management to marketing automation and e-commerce portals.

 

2. Offering CIAM in a multi-cloud world is no easy feat. Regardless of which public cloud platform you support, each has its own unique requirements that are not trivial.

 

3. Lastly, we see a future where Decentralized Identity (DCI) becomes the norm. Using the same technological concept that many cryptocurrencies are based on, blockchain, the goal of DCI is to put control over identity back into the hands of the user. You can share specific pieces of identity-related information with who you choose, instead of all your information all the time.

Go here to read the 2022 Forrester CIAM Wave report in full.