Hello, this is Eric Chabro of Information Security Media Group, I'm speaking with Matt Classen, Director of Solution, Marketing at Ping Identity. Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Eric. Good to be here.
Okay, first off, tell us briefly what does a Ping Identity do? So we are leading provider of Federated Access Management, single sign-on solutions in the security identity management market. And in that market, what is the biggest challenge today? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest challenges, period in security, is this notion that web trend, the trend for mobile, the trend for cloud-based applications, really has made security a very complex problem to solve.
So where people and applications used to be inside a building, and traditional security was all about putting a wall around that building and keeping the bad guys out. Now the people and the applications no longer reside in the building, and so traditional security, in essence, the paradigm of traditional security, keep the bad guys out of firewall as a main means of defense, is sort of broken and a new paradigm is needed. And so our paradigm, we call it identity defined security. It's all about giving the right people access to the right resources, regardless of where they are, regardless of what device they're using, and it all starts with authentication moving beyond passwords as a primary means for authenticating or identifying who an individual is, and moving to multiple factors, even continuous authentication, and then looking at patterns of access as well as to provide them dynamic access to the right applications.
And so, in essence, that's what we do. Okay, you just briefly tell us about how this continuous monitoring of the individual I guess once they logged in works and why is that important? Today, again, the standard is, somebody logs in with the password, they get a session. That's good for X amount of time.
And most companies actually, they have to log in not just once, right? They have to log in many times for different applications, whether they're internal applications or web-based. So the first step is providing them a single sign on portal. So they use corporate credentials to log in once, they get a session, if you will, to that portal.
That portal then controls the session if you will access to applications and passes tokens via a standard call sample, that basically provides secure access to a whole set of applications. But as we look at other factors, where is this person? What device are they using? Are they inside the network?
Are they outside the network or in foreign country? We can continually sort of monitor, if you will, that authentication and access management. And so this is the notion of continuous. We can use geography, we can do step up depending on what they're asking for access to.
If they're outside of a pattern, a normal pattern, we can ask for a second factor of authentication at that point. Maybe it's a swipe on a mobile device. Maybe it's actually something biometric in the future. We can also tie into other solutions like metric as an example as a partner that has a whole lot of other ways of assessing risk and giving risk scores and we can tie into that as well.
Thanks for talking. Thanks, Eric.