SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 06, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Axiad, a leading provider of cloud-based passwordless authentication and secure interactions for users and machines, today announced it has integrated Windows Hello for Business (WHfB) support into the Axiad Cloud credential management platform. With Axiad Cloud, WHfB users can do much more than just authenticate to their Windows 10 machine, Office 365, and Azure-enabled applications. Axiad Cloud enables users to effortlessly extend their WHfB credential to authenticate all of their other applications across the organization, including local and remote resources, 3rd party services, and offers a unified solution to authenticate additional MAC or Linux operating systems.
Microsoft is driving the move to passwordless. More than 200 million commercial customers have already adopted Windows Hello for Business, and the company recently announced it will offer passwordless technology for every consumer as well.
But Microsoft Windows is only one part of the picture. Today’s digital business requires a range of applications that Windows doesn’t support, and machines and digital interactions must be authenticated too. Today’s organizations are managing hundreds of thousands or even millions of machines. New tools and systems are enabling huge gains to efficiency and control in the workplace, with 41 billion IoT devices predicted by 2027. The market for digital signatures, which provide the highest level of authentication for a signer’s identity and digital transactions, is expected to grow to more than $14 billion by 2026.
“Windows Hello for Business provides a much needed step towards eliminating passwords,” said Jerome Becquart, COO of Axiad, “but the reality is that today’s enterprises have a wide range of use cases that require multiple and sometimes complex credentials to securely manage their resources. Axiad is committed to eliminating the confusion and complexity that users face by consolidating credential management into a single platform that is simple and consistent to use across all of their credential issuance and life cycle management.”
Axiad Cloud unlocks the full potential of Windows Hello by extending its offering to all other user applications, machines, and digital interactions across the enterprise. The benefits include:
One credential for every use case
With Axiad Cloud, IT teams can associate users’ Windows Hello for Business credentials with a digital certificate, so they can authenticate to Remote Desktop, VPN, and 3rd party services and providers. All of this is possible in the cloud, eliminating the need to maintain your own on-premises Microsoft public key infrastructure.
Authentication for machines & devices
Today’s business needs to verify all the identities connected to the network – whether they’re mobile phones, IoT devices, workstations, Wi-Fi access points, etc. With Axiad Cloud you can utilize cloud-based PKI to authenticate these use cases. This solution combined with WHFB will give you everything you need to implement Zero Trust in your environment.
Verified communications with digital signing and encryption
Certificate-based email signature with Axiad PKI ensures employees are communicating with the right person and can reduce phishing threats impersonating co-workers. This technology can also be applied to document signing and encryption to ensure a higher level of trust across digital business processes.
Support for any operating system you need
By managing your credentials with Axiad Cloud, your authentication extends beyond Windows devices with credentials to support Mac and Linux as well. Any credential employees require can be managed in one place, giving them a consistent user experience on any operating system whether it’s an iPhone, a Windows PC, etc.
Simplified credential management for the IT team
Beyond user management issues, each credential in addition to Windows Hello for Business requires a separate infrastructure that the IT team needs to maintain. Axiad Cloud ensures that IT can manage all the various credentials in one place and empowers employees to bypass the help desk to self-manage their issues. This allows IT to remove the day-to-day maintenance of their credential systems and get back to their strategic work.
About Axiad
Axiad provides enterprises with its SMARTidentity solution to deliver complete trust across the identity spectrum. Whether you need to secure your employee access, their online interactions, or your machines and devices, SMARTidentity ensures zero trust with PKI, MFA, and FIDO in one platform – Axiad Cloud. Businesses can take an identity-first strategy to cohesively deploy and manage all their credentials such as certificates, mobile MFA, TPM, hardware tokens such as YubiKeys, smart cards, and biometrics. Axiad makes the journey to passwordless simple with user-centric solutions for credential issuance, lifecycle management, and emergency access from anywhere. The SMARTidentity solution is trusted by Fortune 500 companies across healthcare, aerospace & defense, energy & oil, transportation, finance, and more.
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