Gone are the days when a simple username and password were enough to protect an organization from unauthorized access. In today’s rapidly evolving digital climate, managing identities, controlling access, and protecting against data breaches is becoming increasingly complex.
To protect today’s mobile, cloud-based enterprises, a new approach is needed – one that emphasizes secure Identity Access Management (IAM), while enabling business growth productivity, and scalability.
One of the world’s foremost digital identity leaders, ForgeRock offers a comprehensive identity platform that enables organizations to manage authentication and authorization processes across multiple applications and systems in one place.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the key capabilities and benefits that make ForgeRock an IAM provider of choice.
What is ForgeRock?
Established in 2010, ForgeRock is a multinational identity and access management software company that delivers the industry’s only end-to-end, AI-driven platform designed for all identities (workforce, consumers, applications, “things”) – consumable by on-premises, multi-cloud, hybrid, and as-a-service environments.
The ForgeRock Identity Platform enables organizations to securely access the connected world, maximizing the digital experience through a robust offering of key functionalities including:
- Passwordless Authentication
- Strong Authentication
- Contextual Authentication
- Single Sign-On
- Lifecycle Management
- Edge Security
- Data Residency
- API Security
- Consent Management
- Legacy Integration
How is ForgeRock transforming IAM?
As the leading IAM provider, ForgeRock is changing how organizations approach IAM to deliver more personalized user experiences and drive greater value across 6 key capabilities:
- Access Management: ForgeRock AM enables companies to customize user experiences while ensuring secure authentication through passwordless and username-less logins, single sign-on, biometrics, contextual analytics, and behavioral authentication. The solution is risk-based and adaptive, allowing IT teams to quickly adjust user access to applications, systems, and resources when threats appear.
- Autonomous Access: Autonomous Access is a threat-protection SaaS solution that uses machine learning and advanced pattern matching to prevent identity-based cyber attacks and fraud. In addition to monitoring login requests and blocking malicious attempts in real-time, it also adds authentication steps for users who exhibit anomalous behavior and streamlines access for users who are known to the system.
- Autonomous Identity: An AI-driven solution for collecting and analyzing identity data, Autonomous Identity leverages machine learning capabilities to identify access blind spots. It offers enterprise-wide visibility into user access, giving organizations contextual awareness of their risk posture while ensuring regulatory compliance.
- Directory Services: ForgeRock Directory Sevices is a state-of-the-art internet-scale data store that provides developers with a lightweight solution to secure user and application data. With the LDAP Directory Service, businesses get a scalable, high-performance, secure directory server, with built-in data replication, client tools, and a developer-friendly LDAP Software Development Kit (SDK).
- Identity Cloud: The ForgeRock Identity Cloud is a comprehensive IAM solution designed to support hybrid architectures by extending identity and access management for all identities to cloud-based applications and services and on-premise data centers. The solution enables businesses to manage the complete lifecycle of identities including integration with legacy systems, support for APIs, microservices, and things, as well as passwordless authentication and advanced authorization policies.
- Identity Gateway: IG is a centralized proxy-based gateway designed to extend access to legacy on-premises systems such as applications, web servers, APIs, and microservices, without the need to recode. Additionally, IG enables better security consistency, intercepting client requests and server responses, and ensuring the identity has approved access to the requested resource.
What are the benefits of ForgeRock?
The main benefits of the ForgeRock Identity Platform are its performance and scalability, cost efficiency, enhanced user experience, improved security, and increased compliance. Let’s look at these in more detail:
- Scalability and Performance
ForgeRock was designed from day one for the high scale of CIAM and IoT solutions, with the understanding that identity extends beyond users to devices, services, and things. Built with an intuitive XUI framework the platform provides flexible, easy-to-use solutions that are capable of managing many millions of identities, and supports critical systems for traditional user sessions and multifaceted access requirements.
- Reduces Operational Cost and Complexity
As companies grow and scale, managing user accounts across all company applications can cause a serious drain on IT time and resources. By contrast, the ForgeRock Identity Platform simplifies IAM in a single unified hub, leveraging legacy infrastructures and providing multiple integration paths without the complexity of sharing web access tools and passwords for data exchange. As a result of its operational efficiencies, rapid time-to-market, and high scalability, the platform enables businesses to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Improve End-User Experience
Beyond technical capabilities, the true added value of an IAM system lies in its functionality for end users. Through its modular and flexible authentication management, the Identity Platform ensures a seamless user experience. One key example is passwordless authentication, which eliminates the need for user-selected (and easily forgotten) passwords, replacing them with easy multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and SSO for a frictionless user experience.
- Enhanced Security
With the ForgeRock Identity Platform, users can visualize real-time data access and modify access to their shared data to ensure data security against unauthorized access. By providing customers and employees with self-managed data access, organizations are able to reduce the risk of inappropriate use of authorized data and avoid potential security breaches.
- Increased Compliance
As part of its entitlements service, the Identity platform provides attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies with features such as import/export support for XACML and policy editing, as well as REST endpoints for managing policies. Additionally, the platform provides a centralized digital workspace with privacy, an intuitive dashboard, and push notifications for transactions that allow businesses to monitor access according to regulatory compliance standards.
The Big Picture
The digital age has brought a wealth of innovations that have transformed the way businesses operate. But for many organizations, the race to stay ahead of evolving technology trends has resulted in fragmented, distributed IT systems that leave them vulnerable to a multitude of internal and external threats.
However, staying ahead of today’s increasingly complex security risks doesn’t have to mean companies need to face the inconvenience and expense of overhauling legacy identity solutions.
The ForgeRock Identity Platform gives organizations the best of both worlds – leveraging their existing infrastructure with the best in AI capability for a fully integrated, adaptable approach to access management on a single unified platform.
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This article is part of a larger series focusing on the technologies and topics found in the first edition of the TechRadar by Devoteam
To see what our community of tech leaders said about the current position of ForgeRock in the market, take a look at the most recent edition of the TechRadar by Devoteam.
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