Ping Identity, a company focused on helping enterprises provide secure and seamless digital experiences, has acquired Symphonic Software, a flexible and secure authorization management solution.

This acquisition allows the two companies to produce an easily understood solution for enterprises to centralize administration and enforcement to critical resources for all types of users, applications and devices. It also allows enterprises to address scalability and performance requirements.

“With increasing data privacy regulations, users are demanding that enterprises give them better digital experiences with more transparency and control,” said Andre Durand, CEO and founder of Ping Identity. “The acquisition of Symphonic accelerates our vision for enterprises to not only maintain security and compliance with confidence, but to easily deliver personalized, trustworthy experiences.”

The Increased Demand for Privacy

In 2019, it was found that 54% of companies will increase their IT security spending. This comes as a result of 7.9 billion records being exposed due to data breaches throughout the year. This means that billions of people have had their personal data exposed to unauthorized individuals.

In light of this data, companies are spending more money trying to fulfill a growing need for more comprehensive security. Afterall, according to a study done by the Pew Research Center, six out of ten Americans have said they would like their privacy to be more protected. Therefore, Ping’s acquisition of Symphonic Software is very sensical since it is providing more full security through dynamic authorization.

Why Dynamic Authorization Is More Secure

In dynamic authorization, access to an organization’s network data and other sensitive assets are granted real-time via attribute-based control (ABAC) policies. To understand the significance of this, it’s important to first understand the status quo.

Typically, approval for this important information is given through role-based access control (RBAC), which requires constant monitoring, reassessing and reassigning of permissions on individual records. Furthermore, this model can be completely ineffective if there aren’t proper policies to manage the different identities or if the data quality is poor.

ABAC allows access to be given based on attributes about the user, data or environment. This allows for granular yet flexible policy-making, compatibility with new users, and stringent security and privacy.

However, because ABAC is complex to design and implement, enterprises often end up using RBAC despite its negatives. Ping’s acquisition of Symphonic Software is a step toward making ABAC easier to implement for enterprises, leading to more security that comes with lower implementation for companies.

What This Means For Customers

Because of this acquisition, customers now have services ranging from enterprise-grade features like delegated administration to integrated testing and analysis of policies. All this comes at a lower cost now that customers can avoid costly custom integrations that would collectively provide the same service. 

“For the past two years Symphonic has worked alongside Ping to make policy management easy for enterprises,” said Derick James, CEO of Symphonic. “Ping Identity’s dedication to their customers aligns well with Symphonic’s values, and we are thrilled to continue our journey together as one.”

ABOUT THE WRITER

Sarah Raza is a Tech Innovation Fellow with a background in computer science from Stanford. She is passionate about exploring the implications of increased usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning.