Citadel is aimed at developers with an open source identity management platform

Zitadel, an identity management platform, announced $2.5 million in seed funding to enhance its open source identity management platform for developers.

According to Florian Forster, co-founder and CEO of Zitadel, the Zitadel platform is designed to help developers integrate identity management into their software, which forms the basis for the company’s SaaS product. According to Forster, it offers secure login, authorization and user self-service to help developers focus on building their business functions, while Zitadel focuses on providing the necessary functions around user and access management for B2C and B2B -Provide cases.

Passwordless authentication

Passwords are not ideal as they can be forgotten or lost. According to a study, 73% of users reset at least one password every 90 days because they forget it. This explains why more than 60% of employees use the same password for work and personal apps. Although 91% of respondents in a recent survey were aware of the dangers of password reuse, 59% admitted to doing so anyway. It’s no surprise that passwords are a popular target for cybercriminals, as one report suggests password issues are responsible for more than 81% of all cyberattacks.

Passwordless authentication replaces passwords with alternative authentication factors such as biometrics, which can include fingerprints, palmprints, thumbprints, retina or iris scans, or voice or face recognition. In fact, according to Forbes, biometrics are proving to be better than passwords, not only because they offer more privacy and security, but also because they’re easier to use across a variety of desktop, mobile, and server devices.

Many enterprise security leaders are still looking for ways to balance trust and responsibility with cost and user experience (UX) when it comes to identity and access management (IAM). According to Gartner, biometric authentication offers a better chance of achieving this balance than traditional approaches such as passwords or tokens.

A developer-oriented solution

There were several developer-specific challenges that the Zitadel team wanted to solve: Due to the consolidation in the identity market, Forster told VentureBeat in an email interview that “currently there is a lack of developer-oriented identity tools that allow for easy integration into software projects .” As a result, developers may spend a lot of time creating their own authentication and authorization systems. There is also an increasing demand for open source tools written in modern programming languages ​​like Go.

Forster claims that Zitadel, built primarily in the Go programming language, addresses these challenges by providing integrations across a variety of languages ​​and frameworks. He added that this flexibility allows developers to leverage the company’s pre-built capabilities to increase productivity. Additionally, the company claims its capabilities address existing open-source projects that were not designed for a cloud-native and serverless environment.

Cloud Hosting and Self Hosting

Zitadel’s platform is available for both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options. And while traditional hosting has a number of benefits that will keep it relevant for years to come, Zitadel claims its cloud-hosted offering allows anyone to create a Zitadel instance in under five minutes and without using a credit card.

Also, Zitadel says its cloud allows users to define the country or geopolitical region where their data is stored as part of its ongoing commitment to providing GDPR support to its customers. While the GDPR is designed to protect the personal data and data of EU citizens and residents, it can also apply to companies, NGOs and universities outside the EU, such as in the US

Identity management competition

Every online user interaction begins with the user’s identity, and every login must strike a balance between usability, privacy, and security. While there are various companies offering IAM services, according to Forster, Zitadel’s main competitors are Auth0/Okta and Keycloak as they also focus on developers and a passwordless approach.

According to Forster, however, Zitadel combines the properties of several providers in this area. He noted that Zitadel is modern and flexible like Auth0 and open source like Keycloak. He said that compared to Auth0, users would have the freedom to run Zitadel efficiently on any infrastructure. Also, developers looking for an open-source alternative like Keycloak get an identity management platform built on a future-proof technology stack. All of this, Forster said, is accomplished while supporting a number of well-known protocols such as OpenID Connect, OAuth, SAML 2.0, and FIDO.

In a press release, Zitadel said it has improved the solution’s enterprise capability. Multi-tenancy, unlimited audit trails, better self-hosting and serverless deployment support are among the new features, as is the ability to extend Zitadel’s functionality with custom WebAssembly code.

The funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners, will be used to recruit the necessary skills and resources to build a community around the open source project.