Technology Reseller v44

technologyreseller.co.uk 25 SECURITY Tony Shadrake, Vice President of EMEA for Beyond Identity, explains how passwordless multi- factor authentication is poised to fundamentally change the way the world logs on Distology in January or February to give us coverage in the UK; in the summer, we signed Ignition to cover the Nordics and Benelux; and in Israel we signed a distributor called Unicloud, which built out the Okta business there.” Beyond Identity has a couple of relationships with partners in South Africa and Germany and is also soon to expand into the Middle East, but its main focus for now is the UK, Nordics and Israel. “I have been really pleased with the investment that has gone into the European team. This is TJ and Jim Clark’s thing. This is what they generally do; they take the investment early and set things up so we are ready with a team and a channel and revenue channels for when the market really starts to move.” And Shadrake is confident that the market for passwordless identity management is poised for massive growth. “Gartner thinks 60% of large enterprises and 90% of mid- to small- sized companies will have some kind of passwordless initiative under way next year. The TAM for passwordless in general, from an enterprise perspective, is predicted to be $450 billion by 2030,” he adds. Passwordless authentication Founded two years ago to provide simpler passwordless authentication and a means for organisations continuously to authenticate all users trying to access all corporate resources, Beyond Identity is well placed to profit from this demand. Its technology makes use of features of modern computing devices such as increased processing power, biometrics and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to bind a user’s personal identity to their computer or their phone using public/private key cryptography and X.509 certificates with no certificate management. Instead of having to send a password to a server, the user’s phone or PC identifies the user through private keys securely stored in its TPM or secure enclave and validates them to the whole internet, effectively making the user his or her own personal certification authority. This passwordless approach is the foundation of Beyond Identity’s expanding SaaS platform, which now has three core solutions addressing different customer requirements: n Secure your Workforce for enterprises, which ensures that only authorised users and devices have access to cloud resources; n Secure Customers (launched in September), which enables any company to eliminate the threat of customer account takeovers and offer consumers a frictionless authentication experience without passwords, second devices or separate application downloads for native mobile and web applications; and n Secure DevOps (also launched in September), which closes a critical vulnerability by securing the software supply chain against insider threats and malicious attacks. CIAM The market that arguably has the most immediate potential for Beyond Identity is customer identity and access management (CIAM), which the company is addressing with its new Secure Customers solution. This includes SDKs that enable a seller of products or services to provide secure customer authentication with a frictionless user experience across both native (iOS and Android) applications and web Passwordless multi-factor authentication provider Beyond Identity has announced a strategic partnership with Atlas Identity, a leading identity specialist, to resell and provide managed services for Beyond Identity in the UK. The partnership is part of the Beyond Identity’s EMEA expansion plans, which Tony Shadrake explains was one of the big things that attracted him to the role of Vice President of EMEA when he started working for the company in March. “I have been in cyber security for 20 years, here and in the US, primarily with start-up organisations like Beyond Identity, helping them to get established and build up indirect and direct sales channels. Most recently, I spent about 10 years at Carbon Black – I was first man on the ground in 2010 and built out their EMEA team before they went into a successful IPO and then acquisition by VMWare a couple of years ago. And I was at Webroot, when they were building up their enterprise business from their consumer business, building up the channel for them. So, I have plenty of experience in cyber and the channel,” he explains. “Beyond Identity was founded by a couple of industry legends in the US – Jim Clark and Thomas Jermoluk (TJ). Jim Clark founded Netscape in the early ‘90s and Silicon Graphics and TJ has been involved in 8 or 9 start-ups. These guys have plenty of experience building out start-ups to success, and both came out of retirement to work on Beyond Identity.” Shadrake says that Beyond Identity invested early and heavily in EMEA, after raising Series A and Series B funding totalling $105 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT). “There are 12 or 13 of us based in the UK and the Nordics and we also have a five-strong engineering team in Slovakia. We have deliberately gone out with a two-tier distribution model. We signed Don’t get too comfortable Continued... Tony Shadrake