Janrain Announces Identity Central
Janrain today announced Identity Central, its next-generation offering that aims to make it dramatically quicker and easier to implement customer identity and access management, including capabilities such as customer registration, authentication, single sign-on, preference and consent management, and self-service account recovery.
With Identity Central developers can add Janrain’s full suite of centralized, enterprise-grade identity services to their applications in a matter of minutes instead of weeks. “These applications are a centralized, hosted, cloud-based suite of applications that normally our clients had to develop themselves on top of our APIs and incorporate into their digital applications in a distributed, decentralized way,” explains Janrain CEO Jim Kaskade.
In addition, Identity Central enables API-led rapid development that supports continuous integration and continuous delivery using OpenID Connect, an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol that allows users to verify end-user identity and obtain basic profile information about that user in an interoperable way (Janrain was involved in establishing the OpenID Foundation and contributed to the initial OpenID specifications).
“Because of OpenID Connect, these particular protocols are going to allow for a better continuous integration/continuous delivery process because the Janrain support of OpenID Connect comes with a componentized architecture that really makes life simple for developers to incorporate into their automation suites,” Kaskade says. “This is a developer’s dream in terms of making high-quality digital applications.”
OpenID Connect and its self-certification program allows for consistent, interoperable, and secure core capabilities, Kaskade says. “What this new OpenID Connect protocol really represents along with the certification program that it comes with under the OpenID Foundation is the ability to make simple things simple and complicated things possible. It’s a uniquely easy toolkit for developers to integrate compared to the preceding identity protocol,” he says. “There’s a data structure that’s incorporated into this protocol, call it a security token, that has a fundamental new way of protecting the identity data and the way it contains claims about who gets access to it—the ability to basically leverage cryptology or cryptographically signed tokens and supporting higher levels of security…there’s just an amazing amount of security.”
Identity Central also offers centralized policy administration and enforcement and integrated identity analytics, with an eye on optimizing experiences and security. “Because we’re centrally providing these identity experiences, we can also analyze the use of them in a central way that’s consistent,” Kaskade says. “We can provide organizations with things like what’s registration abandonment look like across every app consistently, [or] we can look at fraud and give a view of that across every app consistently.”
Finally, the software’s verified identity feature allows for easy access to downstream API services. “This protocol and these applications allow us to call out to other services in real time and bring in the value of those external services, whether they be real-time marketing systems, real-time fraud systems, or even just systems to get higher levels of assurance. There’s just an inherent ability to bring an ecosystem into the identity experience really simply,” “Kaskade says.