Janrain, the company that pioneered the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) category, and Akamai Technologies, one of the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platforms, has announced a new partnership to provide Janrain Secure Edge, bringing new integrated security capabilities to the Janrain Identity Cloud.
The value of customer profile data linked to customer identities has grown dramatically over the past decade and is one of the most crucial success factors for digital-first enterprises today.
This sensitive data, and the systems handling it, are facing an increasingly complex and sophisticated variety of threats ranging from opportunistic and sophisticated breach attempts to malicious API calls and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In addition to these network-based threats, there is risk from fake or fraudulent user identity creation that aims to abuse a company’s systems or other users.
Akamai and Janrain have partnered to offer joint customers an unprecedented level of protection against both network-based and identity-based threats, leveraging and combining the capabilities of the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which consists of more than 200,000 servers in more than 3,500 locations across 1,600 networks in 131 countries, and the Janrain Identity Cloud, the world’s largest identity network reaching more than 1.75 billion digital identities in more than 3,400 commercial deployments worldwide.
The result is Janrain Secure Edge, a new, always-on multi-component protection layer, which is now an integral part of the Janrain Identity Cloud. It combines industry-leading, risk-adaptive protection from the Akamai Intelligent Platform to safeguard against the latest digital attacks against websites, applications and API infrastructure in general – including DDoS, web application firewall, direct-to-origin attacks and a best-of-class bot management solution – with the identity-based security measures of the Janrain Identity Cloud, including risk-based adaptive authentication powered by automated fraud detection that safeguards against malicious account activities including fraudulent account creation and credential compromise.
Because Akamai applies protections at the edge of the Internet, it can detect and help fend off malicious activities and bad actors before they even reach the actual systems of companies using the Janrain Identity Cloud. This not only minimises the risk of intrusion for Janrain clients but keeps attack traffic away from their sites, which helps to eliminate the need to launch additional and expensive compute resources and prevents negative impact on customer experiences from performance degradation or outages.
“Customer identities are crucial assets to companies but especially to the individuals who they represent. As individuals engage with digital businesses across more areas of their lives, sensitive personal data ends up in their profile data,” said Josh Shaul, Vice President of Web Security, Akamai. “The Akamai Intelligent Platform provides a unique level of protection to Janrain’s clients, shielding them and their customers from an increasingly diverse and fast changing range of threats and attacks that are trying to steal that valuable customer data.”
“The combination of the leading network protection technology from Akamai with Janrain’s focus and innovation in authentication and authorisation for each individual consumer (and thing) identity allows us to secure our clients from malicious activity at the edge in a way that is unique for every user,” said Jim Kaskade, CEO at Janrain. “As the leader in identity security, it was a natural step for us to collaborate with Akamai, the largest and most respected distributed platform operating at the edge of the Internet.”
“The integration of the Akamai Intelligent Platform with the Janrain Identity Cloud allows brands to focus on providing the best digital experiences without compromising on security and data protection, as well as performance or scale,” continued Shaul.
Janrain Secure Edge is available to all Janrain Identity Cloud customers in all global regions, including China and Russia.
As part of Janrain Secure Edge, both companies will work together to further extend security capabilities with an advanced use of data and analytics. “Most companies talking about ‘AI’ reach a level of automation with machine learning technology but miss the mark on self-learning that artificial intelligence promises.” said Kaskade. “Akamai and Janrain combined effectively have over one-third of the global internet traffic to learn from, model, and automate to provide the leading identity security solution for our clients.”
