BIO-key Launches PortalGuard IDaaS Cloud Authentication Solution, Enabling Secure and Flexible Identity & Access Management

Delivering Greater Value, Security, & Scale to Customers & Partners

BIO-key International, Inc., an innovative provider of identity and access management (IAM) solutions powered by biometrics, announced the launch of PortalGuard IDaaS, bringing the power of its award-winning PortalGuard identity and access management (IAM) platform to the cloud as a fully-hosted, scalable and secure identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) offering. PortalGuard IDaaS is operational, having already processed millions of authentication transactions for customers.

PortalGuard IDaaS includes BIO-key’s NIST-certified device-or-server biometric authentication factors, along with fourteen other options for flexible authentication. PortalGuard IDaaS is already operational, having processed millions of authentication transactions for customers. As the demand for always-on cloud computing rises to an all-time high with the global shift to work-from-anywhere, PortalGuard IDaaS lets customers accelerate deployments, cut costs and simplify operations instead of managing an mission-critical IAM solution on-premise. BIO-key’s PortalGuard IDaaS helps organizations across all industries become secure “cloud first” businesses, while maintaining the highest levels of security through PortalGuard’s unmatched integration flexibility and support for a wide variety of authentication factor choices.

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Work-from-anywhere software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions allow public and private entities to provide secure access to applications for employees and customers operating outside of a company’s traditional security perimeter. Security vulnerabilities such as phishing, ransomware, account takeovers and handovers continue to challenge enterprises to secure user access in the increasingly precarious work-from-anywhere landscape. Security teams struggle with adapting the complexity of mainstream IAM solutions and authentication methods to a dynamic group of roving, on-premise and at-home workforces and customers. Many find mainstream one- or few-size-fits-all IDaaS multi-factor authentication (MFA) options, such as phone-based SMS, apps and USB tokens, as both costly to deploy and ineffective in truly identifying individuals gaining access to critical systems. Strategic use of biometric authentication provides greater controls and governance capabilities for these access scenarios, at significantly lower costs.

IDaaS is expected to experience strong growth. Gartner anticipates a 35 percent increase in global midsize and larger organizations using IAM capabilities delivered via SaaS to fulfill most of their identity needs, a prediction made prior to the COVID-19 driven shift to work-from-anywhere. Gartner also predicted growth for biometric authentication thanks to its lower deployment costs, better phishing resistance and superior user experience. BIO-key’s PortalGuard IDaaS is an efficient and proven means for customers to be ready for whatever challenges the future brings.

BIO-key’s PortalGuard IDaaS allows customers to select a deployment model that works with their security requirements and timelines. Regardless of the model chosen, PortalGuard supports nearly every cloud authentication federation standard, all major user directories, and a wide variety of authenticators, including BIO-key’s acclaimed biometrics platform.

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“We believe enterprises should have choices to secure identity the way they want, including leveraging a SaaS model for simplified deployment and operation of their IAM solutions,” says Michael DePasquale, CEO of BIO-key International. “IAM technology needs to be flexible, available everywhere, and highly reliable, allowing customers to focus on their mission, while our PortalGuard IDaaS secures their access points. This launch demonstrates our continued investment in market-leading SaaS and biometric innovation to provide customers with greater security, value and flexibility when they need it the most.”

“For us, the value was in moving the portal out of our data center to reduce the impact of any downtime related to our data center (many of the links in our portal are to other Cloud-based services not hosted in our data center),” said David Ayersman, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, at New River Community and Technical College. “We’re expecting that the total cost of ownership offered by moving to PortalGuard IDaaS will eventually prove to be lower, since the burden of hosting and maintaining the solution is no longer on us. And with SaaS, we’re also expecting that as new features become available, we’ll be able to get them without delay.”

“As a long-time PortalGuard customer, our company is keen to consider a SaaS delivery model,” said Phillip Serio, Manager of IT Security at Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Company. “We continually evaluate our application stack to determine if it makes sense to transition to a cloud-based solution. With a majority of our SSO (Single Sign-on) apps now being cloud-based, moving our PortalGuard deployment to this new SaaS offering aligns with current initiatives that improve availability while also removing the management overhead from our internal teams to maintain the current on-premise architecture.”

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