It’s the 14th Anniversary of Identity Server, and WSO2’s IAM Business… and the Start of Something Big!

WSO2 and Identity and Access Management (IAM) had a big year in 2021, and we are continuing to innovate next-generation identity management solutions. The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation projects at an unprecedented rate. Consumers are leaning towards doing business online in ways no one could have imagined, and that means organizations with Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) initiatives are in the best position to capitalize on the tectonic shift. According to a recent Enterprise Management Associates research, the adoption of modern CIAM platforms increases registrations by 16%. For WSO2, this meant an unprecedented adoption of our flagship product Identity Server. We now serve over 250 customers directly, over 1,000 deployments through OEMs, and manage over 500 million identities, not including thousands of additional deployments using our open source solution. We now serve IAM customers in over 50 countries and added 8 new countries this year.

WSO2 Identity Server provides real-world ROI

Forrester Consulting interviewed WSO2 Identity Server customers to assess the potential return on investment (ROI) and overall financial impact of deploying WSO2's Identity Server for CIAM. According to the study, a composite organization based on actual interviews with WSO2 Identity Server clients can achieve:

• 12 weeks faster time to market
• 60% reduction in development effort around integrations
• A reduction in identity-related downtime
• A reduction in identity management development and support tasks

The evolution of our flagship product Identity Server

 We introduced several changes to Identity Server that are aimed at improving the overall developer experience, including:

• React-based console and self-care portal improve the user experience for developers, administrators, and the end customers

• SDKs alleviate developers need to understand authentication protocols
• The ability to deploy the product in container environments is improved with secret vault support like HashiCorp vault, AWS KMS, Azure KMS
• CIAM use case improvements:
• Enables users to authorize devices, via OAuth Device Flow that enables devices with no browser (ex: IoT devices) or limited input capability (ex: smart TV) to obtain user authorization to access protected resources 
• Enables users to log in with preferred attributes such as email, username, mobile, etc.
• Improved experience in self-registration and account recovery flow letting the user access the service seamlessly upon completion of the flow
• Enables SLO across applications at logout events from federated external identity providers

The launch of Asgardeo

On October 13, we announced Asgardeo, an IDaaS that helps developers create seamless login experiences in minutes. Built upon our 14 years of experience delivering enterprise-grade solutions to our customers, Asgardeo opens up the world of CIAM to small to medium organizations and start-ups looking to integrate single sign-on and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) into their applications. Asgardeo by WSO2 is a new IDaaS that takes the complexity out of managing user access and enables building a secure and frictionless customer experience in just minutes. Asgardeo enables all the key CIAM requirements organizations need to meet and is built for developers with little to no CIAM knowledge. Asgardeo delivers built-in IAM best practices, easy-to-follow documentation, and common workflows including SDK’s to take the pressure off developers to have in-depth knowledge of IAM standards and protocols. Integration with social and enterprise identity providers enhances the customer onboarding and login experience. Strong authentication options include email, OTP, TOTP, passwordless with FIDO2, biometrics, and more to build a secure login experience for customers. User self-registration allows for easy onboarding of customers and password management. As an IDaaS, Asgardeo delivers all of this capability as a service, so organizations don’t have to worry about investing and maintaining the infrastructure needed to support high transaction volumes.

Asgardeo by WSO2 is available today free for early adoption at https://wso2.com/asgardeo

Growth in WSO2 IAM Community

Our IAM community has continued to grow at a record pace. Our Slack Channel currently has 1284 members worldwide. We held 11 Identity Server Community Calls and published over 100 IAM blogs so far this year. Additionally, we posted 10 #identityin15 Youtube videos. Finally, we launched our new IAM4DEVS community, where we share best practices and advice for developers using Asgardeo.

What lies ahead for 2022?

We announced on November 15th that WSO2 had secured $90 million in growth capital from Goldman Sachs Asset Management. WSO2 will use the funds to accelerate global expansion and invest in our next-generation, cloud-native solutions for securely delivering APIs, applications, and digital services. We are honored that Goldman Sachs is confident in our execution and growth potential. 

CIAM for All

We’ve listened to you, our customers, and we’ve heard you loud and clear. You’re embarking on an aggressive journey to the cloud, and you want an IAM platform that can support everything from a cloud-native environment to legacy on-premise environments and everything in between. Moving forward, the combination of Identity Server and Asgardeo will provide an IAM platform that can meet the needs of the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. We will continue to focus on the needs of developers of all types, whether lacking identity or security specialization and looking for an IDaaS, or the needs of highly skilled large enterprise teams looking to benefit from open source solutions. 

Extending CIAM into the larger ecosystem

In order to be effective, CIAM needs to be integrated into the sales and marketing systems that can benefit from a single source of truth of the customer’s identity. Additionally, it is important for CIAM to take advantage of identity proofing solutions already in place or passwordless authentication solutions that take the burden off customers from presenting traditional credentials. In 2022, we will introduce a marketplace that includes complimentary identity proofing and authentication solutions that are pre-integrated with out-of-the-box functionality to allow our customers to be among the most advanced in their CIAM maturity.

Telling the world about WSO2’s IAM Platform

It’s time we moved beyond being the industry’s best-kept secret to letting the world know what our customers already do - WSO2 has the most developer-friendly approach to delivering CIAM for organizations of all sizes. We will be a premier sponsor of the Gartner IAM Summit in North America from March 14-16 in Las Vegas, as well as the Gartner IAM Summit in London from May 12-13. We will also have a major presence at the KuppingerCole European Identity and Cloud Conference May 10-13 in Berlin. We look forward to seeing you at one of these industry conferences. 

WSO2 IAM Team 

I’d like to close out our anniversary celebration by thanking the hundreds of WSO2 employees that are focused on helping our customers be successful with their CIAM projects. Given our open-source heritage, we add value by helping our customers deliver best-in-class CIAM solutions through providing services that deliver industry best practices, and now an IDaaS platform that takes all the deployment, maintenance, and infrastructure complexities off the hands of our customers. We look forward to an exciting 15th year with all of you!