By Adam Powers, Technical Director, FIDO Alliance
The FIDO Alliance already represents the world’s largest ecosystem for interoperable, standards-based authentication. And we’re happy to report that it continues to grow: 250 products are now FIDO® Certified. This is growth of over 200 percent since this time last year.
Organizations with new FIDO Certified products announced today include: Aware, Inc.; Bank of America, Daon; Feitian Technologies Co., Ltd.; HangZhou Synochip Data Security Technology Co., Ltd.; Highmaru Inc.; ISITYOU Ltd.; KICA (Korea Information Certificate Authority); NBREDS; NHN ENTERTAINMENT; SSenStone; thinkAT; TRUXTUN CAPITAL; WiActs Inc.
If you take a look through the FIDO Certified webpage, you’ll see that the array of organizations providing FIDO Certified products is global and diverse. Having led our 7th interoperability testing event and witnessed all of these organizations’ solutions first-hand, I can attest to the fact that their FIDO-compliant solutions are innovative, diverse and flexible, providing some pretty incredible user experiences. That is the beauty of FIDO – it is not one-size-fits-all strong authentication. Rather, FIDO Certified solutions provide many options to address enterprise and service providers’ varying business cases – and desired user experiences.
But all FIDO Certified products and solutions have one very important thing in common: they can eliminate an organization’s risky and inefficient reliance on single-factor username and password authentication. This is a well-known necessity; as analyst Jon Oltsik recently wrote in Network World: “It’s 2016, people, so all organizations should have a plan in place for totally eliminating usernames and passwords.” (He also points to FIDO as a way to make this project easier.)
Beyond growth in certified products, something else has expanded tremendously since we launched the FIDO Certified program in May 2015: the demand from organizations wanting to become FIDO Certified. To meet this surge in demand, we have expanded the program, including the recent launch of On Demand Testing as an alternative to attending interoperability events. The industry’s response has been overwhelmingly positive with several organizations choosing this testing option. If you are interested in On Demand Testing, please visit the certification area of our website to learn more.
In the coming months, we will be making more expansion announcements about the FIDO Certified program, and will launch a new FIDO Certified showcase. Be sure to watch this space!
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