Ping Identity launched a series of enhancements to its Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) technology to improve security and ease-of-use for end users. Ping Identity founder and CEO Andre Durand said the upgrades would “(ensure) that enterprises can create trusted mobile experiences with very little friction, while also supporting IT’s need to move quickly without compromising quality.”

On the security side, key upgrades to the platform include secure, privileged access and support for Windows Remote Desktop, including multifactor-authentication support. To improve usability, Ping Identity has built a consistent UX across mobile devices and improved the UI both for PingOne and the PingOne cloud. FIs and other organizations will benefit from opportunities to co-brand or white-label Ping’s mobile multifactor authentication as well.

“Mobility, combined with unrelenting phishing attacks, have caused multifactor authentication to evolve from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have,'” Durand said. “But it can’t come at the cost of the seamless experience people have come to expect.”

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Ping Identity demonstrated its PingFederate, Cloud Identity Connectors, and integrations with third-party solutions at FinovateEurope 2012. This February, Ping Identity announced a series of new features to its Ping Federate solution, including elastic scalability, which enables IT to dynamically change the size of AWS and OpenStack environments, and contextual multifactor authentication, that gives IT the ability to change system access requirements under various circumstances.

Ping Identity was acquired by private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, in June for an undisclosed sum. The company had raised more than $128 million in funding prior to being purchased.

Just days after being acquired by Vista Equity Partners, Ping Identity has introduced a new identity-management app that could pave the way for a seamless and secure user experience referred to as “continuous authentication.”

The announcement from Ping Identity came as part of the launch of distributed app platform designer Swirlds (as in “Shared Worlds”), which emerged from stealth last week and unveiled its hashgraph-distributed consensus platform. Swirlds enables developers to create distributed apps—permissioned and non-permissioned—with high throughput, fairness, and community consensus. The Swirlds platform differs further from the blockchain in that it has the ability to provide a timestamp of events as well as an evidentiary record. This functionality, which goes beyond what is available via the bitcoin blockchain, enables the platform to support a wide variety of transactional applications ranging from banking and trading markets to gaming and identity apps to cryptocurrencies and public ledgers.

Swirlds CEO Leemon Baird said, “Nobody is talking about building a stock market on Bitcoin blockchain, but you could do it on Swirlds.” Baird added that Swirlds could serve as a standard for distributed session management. Here is a detailed overview of Swirlds’ “fair, fast, provable, Byzantine, ACID compliant, efficient, inexpensive, timestapped, DoS resistant and optionally non-permissioned” technology.

What Ping Identity adds to the Swirlds platform is a way to manage identities across sessions and apps. Essentially, the technology keeps identity session databases synced to facilitate global session logout. The technology could be used, for example, to do away with the notion of “logging in” to a specific app or session. Instead, the user’s identity could follow them across apps and sessions, creating a better user experience while maintaining a high level of security. “The reason for application sessions is we don’t have continuous authentication,” Mance Harmon told ZDNet’s Identity Matters: “If the identity in the session goes away, you need a kill switch that works across client types.” Harmon is Ping’s senior director of architecture and labs.

In addition to the technical partnership, Ping Identity has invested capital in Swirlds, as well. “Swirlds represents a huge technological breakthrough that can change the way distributed-consensus communities function across a myriad of industries and use cases,” Patrick Harding, Ping’s Identity CTO, said. Calling it “the new identity standard,” Harding said the technology “solves the major challenges that identity professionals face in conducting and verifying session logout.”

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Ping Identity demonstrated PingFederate, Cloud Identity Connectors, and integration with third-party products at FinovateEurope 2012. The company announced new features to its PingFederate security solution in February, adding elastic scalability and contextual multifactor authentication. Named one of the top-100 tech companies in Colorado in 2015 by Built in Colorado, Ping Identity was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in June.