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Global Security Mag: David Baier, good morning. Thank you very much for sparing this time for Global Security Mag. Please, can you introduce yourself and tell us how your professional journey brought you to your current position?


David Baier: Thanks for having me. My current position is Senior Solution Architect here at Ping Identity. I started my career after my studying Human-Computer Interaction at Würzburg.
After having my bachelor’s degree from Würzburg University, I started as an IT Consultant at an ERP company, but then I quickly joined another company which is called Weidmüller GTI Software GmbH. It’s a big family enterprise in Germany and I was responsible for a software unit which was specialized in digitalization of industrial processes, like HMI (Human-Machine Interface) and SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition). So, you have a process where you want to put an HMI on it, some of the UI elements to really control machines, completely control process automation at all. And, of course, during that time I just had a lot of positions in that company. I first started with the head of support and project, and then I went through project management, and at the end it was an automation Sales Engineer position that I had. Doing so, I had a bright overview in that company and then I just looked for new challenges and that is how I came to Ping Identity. It was just about a little updating my LinkedIn profile and then a recruiter contacted me from Ping Identity. They made a very good impression, and they gave me some challenges that I needed since I was eight and a half years with my old company. So, that is how I came to Ping Identity. I really like being at Ping Identity and I like the Ping Identity family. It is a challenging job and that is what I love. Indeed, I want to face challenges anytime, dealing with new technologies and so on. I manage challenges at Ping Identity in a daily basis.

Global Security Mag: Can you please tell us more about Ping Identity? What makes Ping Identity unique?

David Baier: Sure. Ping Identity was founded in 2002 in Denver, Colorado, still the headquarters, which is impressive. And the founder is still the CTO (Chief Technical Officer) of our company, which is remarkable for a U.S. company. We always have had the focus on Identity and Access management at Ping Identity. We went through all the stages in that space, from Federation, going more into MFA (Multi-Factors Authentication), now dealing with AI as well as decentralized Identity solutions. We are always capable of adapting our strategy on the market situation.
Ping Identity is a well-known player in that whole game. If you look at the analysts’ reports like KuppingerCole or Gartner, you can see that Ping Identity is always on top of the list. So, our company is a big player in the Identity and Access Management market. We also have many well-known customers. We deal with at least 50 % of the Fortune 100 companies. 10 out of 10 largest banks are our customers. We have the biggest healthcare providers in the world using our products. Ping Identity has a mature portfolio. Ping Identity secures over 8 billion identities all over the world and we are on the way reaching 10 billion.
Ping Identity has always wanted to be a trustful and open-minded vendor. Our solutions are developed to be as easy configurable as possible, and we provide all the needed standards to connect to existing systems. We do not use any kind of native protocol, but open standards making the services connected to our system as easy as possible. Ping Identity allows its customers to be easily integrated to the IAM ecosystem. The aim is to give you all the open standards to our customers, making integrations as easy as possible. So, Ping Identity is not a vendor locked solution. That is an advantage against the competitors. We also offer services to our customers implementing our solutions to protect them from being attacked by hackers. We offer a good AI-based risk and fraud solution. We provide with everything regarding registration, authentication with ID, verification services, MFA, SSO (Single Sign-On) services. We are looking into the whole topic about decentralized identity. Ping Identity is in the forefront on that subject, as we have a lot of knowledge in those credentials and digital wallets interactions. these are among our key topics for the next years. We also have authorization engines to give API (Application Programming Interface) protection. And one of the cool things with Ping Identity is that you can choose whatever service you like, without being obliged to buy all the portfolio with functionalities that you even don’t need, which is costs saving. You can pick the service that you need for the beginning and afterwards, you can easily add services to your infrastructure, making integrations easier.

Global Security Mag: What are your key messages for our readers? CISOs, CIOs, and Cybersecurity Managers?

David Baier: CISOs should think about strategies in regard of Passwordless, because based on many reports, passwords issues are the baddest thing for infrastructures security. There are now many possibilities with passkeys, which is more secure.
Going for Passwordless makes the User Experience simpler while increasing the security.
The second message is, don’t be afraid of AI (Artificial Intelligence). It really gives you more possibilities to make interactions simpler. We all know that attackers use AI, but you can also use AI to mitigate AI cyberattacks. Ping Identity uses AI for its risk and fraud protection service, using Machine Learning algorithms to make identity-based evaluation results, and to learn about user behavior, user patterns and so on.