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FireID earns Frost & Sullivan 2009 Innovation Award

Frost & Sullivan has awarded FireID, the local provider of security applications for mobile authentication, the 2009 New Product Innovation Award.

FireID delivers highly secure, mobile authentication via one-time passwords (OTPs), which provide benefits for both consumer and IT enterprise communities by eliminating the difficulty and cost associated with hardware tokens, as well as the security vulnerabilities and need for cellular connectivity required by SMS-based authentication.

"FireID has comprehensively satisfied the need for a robust two-factor authentication mechanism with its novel, lightweight mobile authentication application,” says Sampath Achyuthanandan, research analyst, Technical Insights, Frost & Sullivan.

There are two key aspects that make FireID an innovative offering.

First, FireID’s solution transforms the mobile phone, which users carry with them perpetually, into a self-contained security token that can generate secure OTPs on-demand. As a result, users need not worry about carrying a hardware token or remembering multiple passwords for authentication in online transactions.

“The second innovative aspect is the FireID universal personal authenticator’s ability to generate OTPs even when there is no cellular network connectivity. The OTPs are generated offline by the mobile application for authentication into any FireID protected online resource, virtual private network (VPN), or extranet,” adds Achyuthanandan.

The 2009 African Mobile Two Factor Authentication Solutions New Product Innovation Award forms part of Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Research. In terms of this research, Frost & Sullivan named FireID the winner, comparing it with competitors in the areas of innovation, leveraging of leading-edge technologies, value-added benefits and features, increased customer value, and customer acquisition/penetration potential.

FireID is gaining rapid traction in South Africa and globally, with several customers having gone live locally, and channels being set up worldwide.

Frost & Sullivan praised FireID for its potential increased customer value and noted that:

* FireID has value for VPN/remote access, online shopping sites, social networks, Web-based e-mail, online document repositories, Internet banking, consumer portals, firewalls, servers, network switches and routers, and practically any device, application or website that requires robust authentication.

* FireID is recognised for leveraging the Open Authentication (OATH) standard algorithm and its support of all popular mobile operating systems, including Symbian, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, and Java-compliant mobile devices.

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