Yesterday, we announced our selection as a 2023 SINET 16 Innovator. As a company, we are especially proud of winning this award and excited about what it represents for us and what it means to our enterprise customers.
I’d like to underscore the importance of this milestone and achievement since many in the industry may not be as familiar with SINET as other prestigious cybersecurity awards such as the RSA Innovation Sandbox or annual SC Magazine awards. SINET has been recognizing and designating 16 companies as “Innovators” every year for more than a decade. The SINET judging committee is made up of esteemed senior members of the cybersecurity community whose collective judgement and wisdom around technology trends and innovation is worth listening to.
This year, 115 judges across a wide spectrum of the cybersecurity ecosystem took part in selecting the winners, including leaders from government, enterprise, investors and bankers. The panel effectively singled SDO out of all areas and niches of cybersecurity for our work to advance and make phishing-resistant Passwordless Authentication viable across the enterprise.
What’s important here and why we value this award so highly is that it is not a “pay to play” effort but a true accolade awarded purely on merit. In being named a winner, SDO submitted a full picture of our market traction, value proposition, and most importantly, our competitive differentiation. Close to 200 companies submitted applications for this award across all categories of cybersecurity, which makes the recognition even more special.
Recognition shows MFA’s importance
This award recognizes just how far the passwordless multifactor authentication (MFA) movement has come in the past few years since being considered a novelty. SDO remained steadfast in our focus on passwordless MFA for the workforce over the years even when some experts advised us to broaden the scope of our solution to include consumer IAM.
Our singular focus, along with our unique architectural approach, is what makes our solution the most deployable and proven enterprise Passwordless solution at scale. If you haven’t explored what makes us different before, take a moment to read our why SDO page to get a sense for it.
What the innovation means for enterprise customers
Passwordless has become one of the highest priority topics for enterprise IT leaders and many vendors have jumped into the space in the past few years. As we’ve seen so often in cybersecurity, it becomes harder to separate the wheat from the chaff in a saturated, noisy market. The SINET16 Innovator award represents a distinction that we hope will help future prospects navigate their Passwordless MFA options more easily.
For us, innovation is most sustainable and successful when it’s practical. That’s how we’ve attempted to architect the Secret Double Octopus platform through the years.
For customers, SDO winning the SINET16 award validates their choice and contributions to a solution that is cutting-edge but also usable and accessible — built for the enterprise by the enterprise. The recognition also enforces our position as a solid innovation and market leader, not a fly-by-night startup with a cool but unproven technology.
As we celebrate today, we extend our thanks to those customers who made important contributions to our innovation over the years. Their input benefitted our evolution more than we anticipated as they asked us to include specific capabilities in our technology. Some of the most important features, the ones that now make us unique, started with customer requirements including user-set passwords, adaptive assurance, and proprietary passkey-type capabilities.
Milestones in Passwordless innovation
In submitting to be considered by SINET, SDO called out three differentiators, things we believe only our platform delivers. We’re the only one that works with modern SSO and FIDO2 methods, and also with on-premises and legacy apps that require passwords.
We deliver one Passwordless MFA workflow that starts with the desktop and extends to local or remote access for line-of-business corporate applications. Users never need to create or remember a password, so they can’t expose or get phished for one. Octopus Passwordless MFA can save companies millions of dollars every year by avoiding risk (and breaches) from phishing, reducing help desk calls involving passwords, and saving users time all day long. All this happens without the expense of having to recode apps or re-architect the identity infrastructure.
Building on recognition
The recognition by SINET adds to two highly valued milestones for SDO: being named a Gartner Cool Vendor early on in our journey (the only one from the workforce Passwordless market) and being singled out in the industry’s most thorough review of Passwordless MFA at the time (by the AITE Group).
We appreciate this prestigious validation from the SINET executive judging committee of the importance of strong authentication and of SDO’s approach to solving a difficult problem.