Authentify
Providing Authentication Services to Educators Worldwide

Along the beautiful Chicago skyline, a meeting occurred with Peter Tapling, President and CEO of Authentify. He spoke about everything, from his love for cooking and sailing to his dream of riding Authentify through higher technology waves. “Anyone who sails can’t be 100 percent certain what’s going to happen in the hours after they cast off. You’re entirely responsible for your crew and passengers, which creates a level of self-reliance in managing the whole process,” says Tapling. “In my spare time, I enjoy cooking as well. When I cook a meal, there is a beginning, middle, and end. However, in the technology business, there is a lot of change in the middle,” he adds. It’s worth mentioning that ‘middle’ in the technology business enables this field to keep evolving rapidly.

Since 1999, Authentify has provided security and authentication solutions to enable its clients to secure their user processes. “The idea for applying similar security techniques to educational services sprang from the increase in online opportunities for advanced education. The challenge faced by the educators is to adopt a mechanism which would ensure the identity of the students who enroll for remote courses,” remarks Tapling. Authentify’s services enable educators to perform real-time, multi-factor user authentication to ensure the same student who does the work is the same student taking tests and getting the credit.

The company is experienced in delivering Out-of-Band Authentication services to its clients which requires service-oriented message architecture to integrate into the user’s existing security processes. Authentify also offers services like voice biometrics, which captures the user’s voice at the time when they enroll so that their identity can be authenticated throughout the course. In the e-Commerce sector, the company has a strong demand for commercial authentication, which supports high security credentials at a better price.

Authentify’s customers also include banks and healthcare companies who are in need of database solutions. “Our customers like the fact that Authentify is able to identify new technologies much earlier than them,” says Tapling.

“One of the benefits we have as a cloud service provider is we can make adjustments to new technologies very quickly and enable those adjustments to our customers faster than they can on their own,” he adds.

One of the benefits we have is that we can make adjustments to technology very quickly and enable those adjustments to our customers faster than they can do on their own

One of their clients, Castle Worldwide, faced a challenge related to ROI in expenses for educational institutions. Castle had employed workers for issuing security credentials to its students. The cost, however, was prohibitive. The company needed a way to authenticate the legitimate student in a convenient, cost-effective way. Authentify provided their service, Out-of- Band Authentication, to help Castle enroll its students in the beginning and perform appropriate testing throughout the course to ensure that the right person is taking a test.

Authentify has seen an acceleration in the market thanks to mobile technology and is developing innovative authentication techniques to capture momentum in the mobile market for educators. “Authentify’s newest services are mobile focused and concentrate on separating a user’s personal information from the authentication process. This will be critical in international markets where privacy is protected more vigorously than in the U.S.,” says Tapling. The company’s innovative approach in privacy and user control is something different in the user authentication space. The end user and each organization that relies on Authentify’s xFA platform has considerable control over who and how their information gets used, preventing any loss of personal information or credentials.