Stop Catastrophizing and Start Capitalizing on Identity Security that Invigorates Your Business

There’s a term used in psychology to describe when someone assumes the worst will happen. Called “catastrophizing,” it involves believing that you’re in a worse situation than you really are or exaggerating the difficulties you face. An Australian CSO last week told me he felt that cybersecurity leaders catastrophize too much. What he really liked about our story at Transmit Security is that we’re focused on using security to enable the business. Our conversation was much different than those he usually has with cybersecurity vendors.

This is what really appeals to me about Transmit Security. I’ve spent a good portion of my career creating or disrupting market categories. The market we’re in at Transmit Security, called customer identity and access management — or CIAM — is ripe for disruption. It has been dominated by workforce-centric identity vendors who focus on topics such as zero trust and ransomware. Cybersecurity leaders naturally spend a lot of time dealing with threats, so these topics resonate. Many have to make tradeoffs between security and business outcomes such as speed-to-market, innovation and customer experience. But with CIAM, we have a unique opportunity to stop catastrophizing and instead focus on enabling businesses to thrive.

What this means is you and your business partners should never compromise between security, customer experience or speed to market. You should expect all three outcomes.

Compromising on security results in account takeover, data theft and fraudulent transactions. Compromising on customer experience hurts business and can even put digital services out of reach for disadvantaged people. Compromising on speed to market puts you at a competitive disadvantage. None of these are acceptable.

So we’re fixing this. Our unique approach involves four main tenets of innovation.

1. Security comes first. As our name implies, we are and always have been a cybersecurity company. This means we’ve been able to make good user experience possible by getting security right from the start; for us, security is not an afterthought. We’ve found that poor security leads to poor user experience, and the converse is also true. With this in mind, we’ve developed more immersive, contextual security so the user experience is as frictionless as possible.

With our complete CIAM platform, you reduce the security burden on your customers, asking them to authenticate less often, minimizing the need for SMS OTPs, magic links and the like. We are now able to make the overall experience more seamless without sacrificing security. In fact, it’s because our security is strong that your user experience is better!

2. We are developer-friendly. We’ve built a cloud-native CIAM platform that provides an integrated suite of identity security services that are easy for developers to use. A comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs empower your developers to quickly build identity security into your sites and apps. Pre-built user flows handle every scenario and use case — so you don’t have to. They allow your business to execute faster.

Do you need a secure user identity store (database)? Here are a handful of APIs to create, authenticate, authorize and change or delete user accounts. Do you need to protect your accounts from bad actors and account takeover? Here’s the API that ties into our continuous risk monitoring so you can assess trust and act on risk levels in real time. Do you want to add WebAuthn or social logins for your users? Again, here are some simple APIs. And if you want to keep using SMS OTPs and magic links for some use cases, we’ve got those too.

With our approach, developers don’t have to be cybersecurity experts to build what they need. And cybersecurity leaders can take comfort in what the developers are using. As a cybersecurity company, we have a team of dedicated researchers who understand the threats, monitor the dark web, obtain the exploits used by bad actors and develop countermeasures. When possible, we make those countermeasures invisible to your users. And by making it simple for developers to implement, you quickly gain the advantages and ROI.

3. We’ve embedded orchestration into our platform. As the company that invented omnichannel identity orchestration in 2016, we’ve learned that orchestration with a sophisticated policy engine is needed to integrate and unify an otherwise fragmented, overly complex identity stack. It’s not uncommon to see multiple authenticators, user directories, fraud detection and identity verification technologies in use. Transmit Security was born in this world of complexity and has made it work for so many of our customers.

But you shouldn’t have to live in that complicated world. If you had a natively integrated solution, orchestration is a simpler affair. You no longer need to stitch together a complicated array of identity, security and fraud protection technologies if they’re part of the same platform. But you still need the policy engine and the ability to optimize the user experience that orchestration provides. So we built all of those capabilities directly into our platform. For most companies, this is exactly what’s needed because it’s incredibly secure, easy to use and simpler to deploy and maintain.

4. Our platform is cloud-native. We did not lift-and-shift our earlier products; we built a cloud-native identity platform using modern technologies, standards and practices — from the ground up. There’s a lot to unpack here, and I won’t bore you with details on the ingenuity and advantages of Kubernetes, CDNs, MongoDB and so on. The result is a solution that is not only highly scalable and efficient, it performs. Unlike workforce IAM built on prem or cloud migrated to support hundreds to thousands of employees, you must be able to support millions of customers a day and surges of traffic. When your site slows down, customers leave and that costs you business. Our cloud-native architecture ensures instant load times — the availability and performance your customers demand. It also allows us to innovate faster for you.

What we’ve built started as a vision to reinvent CIAM, and it’s why our investors put so much capital into Transmit Security in June 2021, when we announced the largest Series A funding round in cybersecurity history. Since then, we have grown first-half revenues by 40% year over year, expanded our employee base by 41%, grown our customer base by 51% and exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

In this same time, we’ve added many amazing new customers such as Goldman Sachs, BRED Banque Populaire and America’s Car-Mart, adding to our list that included Citigroup, Lowe’s, UBS, Santander and HSBC. In March, we were honored by Fast Company as one of “The 10 Most Innovative Security Companies of 2022.” We are humbled by the recognition, and it’s fueling our determination to take CIAM to the next level.

We’ve not only made security and customer experience synergistic — improving both — we’ve made it all easier and faster to implement to build the identity experiences you need.

It’s time to stop catastrophizing and start capitalizing on good security for your business. It’s time to stop compromising.