Haider Iqbal | Director of Product Marketing
The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Consumers has recognized Thales as an Overall, Innovation, Product, and Market Leader in the Passwordless Authentication. The report praises the platform for offering a versatile set of identity applications encompassing a wide range of authentication methods to meet organizations’ needs.
Thales Leadership in the Passwordless Authentication
KuppingerCole commends the Thales OneWelcome Identity Platform for offering versatile capabilities to facilitate user passwordless experiences. The report praises the platform’s “extensive support for passkeys and the ability to synchronize passkeys for use across various devices and low-assurance scenarios.” Moreover, the report highlights that our product has been “independently certified to support compliance with multiple standards, including FIPS, ISO, PSD2, and eIDAS.”
Thales achieved high ratings across the board. KuppingerCole awarded the solution a Strong Positive rating in Security, Functionality, Interoperability, and Usability, and a Positive rating in Deployment. Similarly, Thales performed well in vendor ratings that go beyond the product view, scoring Strong Positive in Innovativeness, Market Position, Financial Strength, and Ecosystem.
KuppingerCole lists API security, flexible deployments, a strong partner ecosystem, a good OOTB selection of connectors, fraud prevention capabilities, modern UIs, and dashboards, the ability to comply with country-specific regulatory requirements, and excellent consent and privacy management capabilities, available as a standalone service that works in conjunction with other CIAM products.
The Passwordless Authentication Landscape
The password no longer fits the purpose. We live in a world where the average person has hundreds of accounts for hundreds of different services and, therefore, must manage hundreds of different passwords. This is no longer sustainable. Couple this problem with an onslaught of phishing, credential stuffing, and brute-force attacks, and you’re left with a world in dire need of an alternative to the password that satisfies both the need for improved user experience and security.
KuppingerCole recognizes this demand and attributes to it, in part, the exponential growth of the passwordless authentication market.
The report also recognizes the significance of a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape and the establishment of industry standards in increasing the demand for passwordless authentication. It cites the US government’s recently published cybersecurity memorandum emphasizing the need for stronger enterprise identity and access controls, including using phishing-resistant MFA and adopting a Zero Trust model.
Similarly, the report argues that the development of open standards such as Fast Identity Online (FIDO)2 and WebAuthn have further generated the adoption of passwordless technologies.
According to KuppingerCole, the passwordless authentication market’s growth shows no signs of slowing down. Analysts predict the market will generate $6.6 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $2.2 billion in 2022. The report attributes this expected growth to the use of passkeys by companies such as Google and Apple and argues that we are heading toward a “passwordless future.”
Passwordless 360°
Thales recently expanded our passwordless authentication offerings with Passwordless 360°, a new approach that offers the broadest coverage and flexibility across all user types. It allows organizations to take advantage of the newest technologies, such as FIDO passkeys, that offer the full potential of going passwordless while also leveraging previous investments in passwordless technologies.
The Passwordless 360° approach provides a comprehensive framework for planning and evaluating passwordless implementations. The key steps of this approach include:
- Charting the user ecosystem, including workforce, customers, and partners, to evaluate and understand the access journeys and potential security gaps.
- Determine risk-based authentication methods and strengths for each identified group.
- Perform a gap analysis to identify and mitigate remaining vulnerabilities.
Thanks to its unique portfolio of IAM products and services, Thales can help organizations adopt the Passwordless 360o approach by:
- Migrating customers smoothly from passwords to synced passkeys for low-assurance use cases and device-bound passkeys for high-assurance use cases.
- Helping organizations deploy FIDO to their workforce and better control their FIDO keys life cycle
- Removing completely passwords from the authentication flow when accessing Windows desktops or web applications
If your organization wants to make the switch to enhance security and improve user experience with passwordless authentication, consider Passwordless 360°. It provides a complete group of capabilities so your organization can plan for a wider scope of use cases—from secure access to personal and web devices to legacy and modern web resources. You can also download the full 2024 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Passwordless Authentication for Consumers report here.