This Service provider (SPLA) program delivers SMS PASSCODES award winning two-factor authentication solution on a quarterly subscription basis with no upfront commitment requirements. Whether you call it hosing, service provider, software-as-a-service or Cloud Computing, it is all about delivering a certain capability in a more flexible manner than a traditional perpetual license on premise solution. SMS PASSCODE actually is more of an ideal fit to service providers than one would think.
First, users of hosting services wanted to eliminate servers and outsourced that. Then they wanted to avoid application maintenance and started sourcing these as a service to avoid on-premise efforts. Now, with the arrival of SMS based two-factor authentication like SMS PASSCODE, users can now also get rid of the traditional tokens and outsource that service to a hosting provider as all users already has a cell phone.
The program has a few benefits including:
Earn profits with SMS based two-factor authentication
Traditional token based two-factor authentications solutions have been challenged for hosting providers due to the heavy administration and implementation burdens of physical devices. This is more prevalent when you have many small customers that frequently need activation or changes. SMS PASSCODE offers a new generation two-factor solution that uses the mobile phone SMS. This removes any hardware administration enabling a new user to be activated with a single click. The result is simply that service providers and hosting vendors now can offer this new service with no staff investments required and therefore quickly generate more profits by selling new capabilities to the customers. That the solution also is more secure and protect against the modern threats on the internet is an added benefit that can be use to differentiate the services offered from that of the competition.
Designed from the ground up for service providers
Service providers and hosting vendors have a set of different requirements than traditional enterprise clients. The recently announced SMS PASSCODE version 3.0 shipping already has a set of hosting specific capabilities that makes hosting two-factor authentication easy:
- Multi-tenant support: SMS PASSCODE can have multiple hosting clients running different Active Directories within the same installation with full redundancy and load balancing capabilities. This includes support for multiple SMS transmitters so each customer has their own SMS billing, transformations if user data is stored different from customer to customer.
- Scalable and fault tolerant: SMS PASSCODE is a “loosely” cloud ready design that enables service providers and hosting vendors to add new modules and new SMS PASSCODE “servers” on the fly without ever taking the system down or reboote the server. New users and new customers can also be added on the fly by simple adding the new users to the SMS PASSCODE group in the existing Active Directory domain
- Each customers login process can be personalized based on an advanced rules engine enabling backup routines such as sending the code to a backup phone in the evening, routing users based on country code to the local SMS sender or a host of other ways easily configured with the web-based user interface
The hosting program is open to any authorized SMS PASSCODE reseller and is sold through SMS PASSCODE’s global network of distributors. To enter the program, a service or hosting provider needs to contact the local distributor. The start package contains all the needed components of SMS PASSCODE including the first 10 users. In addition to that, users are acquired in increments of 10 users making the program very attractive also for the small- to medium sized hosting market.
According to BBC and Ericsson, there are now more than 5 billion mobile phones in the world and the number is still growing. According to Ben Wood, mobile phone analyst at CCS Insight, ” … the mobile phone may be “the most prolific consumer device on the planet …… Now almost every adult, child and domestic pet seems to have one, given that 30 million phones are sold every year in the UK,” he said.
