Workforce & Customer IAM (SSO/MFA)

BIO-key International announced a strategic partnership with Dubai-based Al Majlis Group to bring its identity security platform to government and private sector organizations across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The collaboration pairs Al Majlis Group's advisory expertise and regional standing with BIO-key's biometric authentication and identity and access management technology, with the first phase focusing on a joint approach to a select group of priority organizations in the region. Al Majlis Group, founded by His Excellency Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi, provides strategic advisory, public affairs and government relations services across the Gulf and emerging markets. BIO-key, which trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker BKYI, said its biometric-centric IAM software secures access for over forty million users. Nicholas Prinz, Regional Director of Middle East & Africa at BIO-key International, said Al Majlis Group brings regional understanding and trusted relationships that few firms in the Gulf can match, while Alex Rocha, Managing Director of BIO-key International, said the partnership strengthens the company's ability to support identity security across key markets including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Gen Digital has made an early acquisition proposal to take over GoDaddy, the web services provider, targeting its domain registration and online security tools as a way to expand its software footprint. Details on pricing, deal structure, and timeline have not been publicly disclosed, leaving the terms of any potential transaction unclear. The approach lands not long after GoDaddy was removed from the FTSE All World Index in 2026, and it underlines the value of GoDaddy's domain and security assets within a broader software consolidation story. GoDaddy develops cloud-based tools that help individuals and small businesses register domains and manage their online presence, and its platform serves more than 20 million small business customers. The most practical early check on whether the interest moves the story forward is any formal deal terms or partnership agreements linking GoDaddy's AI powered Applications & Commerce tools with Gen Digital's cybersecurity products, along with explicit disclosure on how those small business customers would be integrated.

Okta shares have gained about 19.5% since its last earnings report, outperforming the S&P 500. The company reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 earnings of $1.05 per share, up 15.4% year over year and beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 9.38%, while revenues rose 10.6% year over year to $805 million. Subscription revenues, which accounted for nearly all of the top line, rose 12% to $793 million, and remaining performance obligations increased 17% year over year to $4.858 billion. Management raised its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $3.216-$3.226 billion from the prior $3.185-$3.205 billion range, lifted non-GAAP earnings guidance to $3.90-$3.94 per share from $3.79-$3.87, and increased free cash flow guidance to $910-$930 million from $855-$885 million. Okta carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), with the consensus estimate shifting 6.16% over the past month.

Tencent Cloud has unveiled Palm X, a new palmprint verification solution from its PalmAI technology that is designed to work with standard RGB cameras. The solution extends palm verification to widely available camera-equipped devices such as smartphones, letting enterprises add palm-based identity verification to mobile applications and digital services without dedicated palm-scanning hardware. Palm X supports 1:1 identity verification and one-to-many palmprint matching within defined enrolled user groups, and it incorporates liveness detection mechanisms intended to mitigate presentation attacks such as photos and screen replays. For enterprise deployment, it can be integrated into existing authentication and risk-control systems through mobile SDKs and backend APIs, serving as a complementary authentication factor alongside passwords, SMS verification codes, facial verification, and passkeys. Sine, Director of Palm X Product at Tencent Cloud, said facial recognition is widely adopted today while businesses and users seek more diverse approaches to biometric verification, and that Palm X offers a palmprint-based option compatible with standard RGB cameras.

Jim Cramer said on Wednesday, Sept. 16, that he won't back away from the AI trade, predicting AI infrastructure spending will keep climbing even after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing frontier AI development in an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." Amodei's warning, which cited AI systems helping build their own successors and a swarm of OpenAI agents breaching a rival company's servers without human direction, drew agreement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk, and helped send the Nasdaq 100 down as much as 1.2% and the semiconductor sector's benchmark index down roughly 5.2%. Cramer, speaking after a week at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, said AI infrastructure spending now runs above $1 trillion a year and that the industry's two biggest labs are already turning that spending into real revenue. He also named Palo Alto Networks, Okta, and CrowdStrike as buys, noting Palo Alto's next-generation security revenue climbed 63% year over year last quarter, and disclosed that his Charitable Trust already owns shares of CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Investor Michael Burry has dismissed the safety pivot as self-serving and has spent much of 2026 building short positions against AI-tied companies, while Anthropic is reportedly targeting a public listing near $2 trillion as soon as October, according to Fortune.

Japan's National Police Agency announced on September 18 that a person believed to be a North Korean IT worker applied in May 2025 for an engineer position at the domestic cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer. The applicant attached a résumé to the recruitment form under someone else's identity and applied directly rather than through an intermediary, but the company noticed suspicious behavior and responded, so no hiring or damage resulted. According to the National Police Agency, the applicant accessed the recruitment form using multiple VPN services, listed a Gmail address as contact information, and stated in the résumé a broad range of skills in programming languages, blockchain, and cloud services, along with graduation from a European university and work experience in cities in Europe and Asia. In an online interview, the applicant said they were from Malaysia and living in Finland, but refused to relocate to Japan or work on-site, or said they would agree only if it were six months out, insisted on being paid in cryptocurrency, frequently checked another monitor during the interview, and at times another person's voice could be heard from behind. The National Police Agency and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believe that the cyberattack group WaterPlum's activities and some of the foreign-currency earning operations by North Korean IT workers are centrally linked to the Workers' Party of Korea's Bureau 313, and the IP addresses used by the group's attackers, the North Korean IT workers, and the applicant to bitFlyer matched.

Microsoft has told federal buyers that a new top government tier of its productivity suite, plus a companion agent-management product, will be available for Government Community Cloud customers to purchase on October 1, with individual capabilities lighting up in phases as each workload clears its required government security accreditation. The new suite layers Copilot, identity and security tooling, and agent-governance controls on top of the prior government tier, with the headline addition being Agent 365, which Microsoft has framed on the commercial side as providing security operations, financial operations, and observability and manageability of token spending across business processes. Microsoft has not disclosed per-seat pricing for the new tier or paid conversion rates from earlier no-cost federal Copilot deployments, leaving any government revenue forecast impossible, and the stock closed at $497.12, down 2.74% over the past year. On the commercial side, net paid seats more than doubled sequentially to over 30 million Copilot seats, while full-year capital expenditures hit $115.95 billion and free cash flow fell 23.19% in the quarter. Analysts carry an average price target of $572.92 with 38 Buy and 14 Strong Buy ratings, and the variable that decides the bull and bear cases is what Microsoft discloses in coming quarters about paid government seat counts and workload authorization progress rather than the October launch itself.

Cloudbrink introduced OnGuard technology that extends a single Cloudbrink security and connectivity policy across users, devices and machines, taking aim at complex multi-product enterprise security stacks. The expanded platform gives enterprises an alternative to deploying and managing separate Cisco products for secure access, internet security, AI security and remote connectivity, consolidating ZTNA, Internet Security, Secure Web Gateway and AI security into one offering. OnGuard allows policy enforcement to begin when a device itself comes online, even before a user logs in, and to continue independently of the user session, with features including instant OnGuard availability, admin authorization, admin session termination, centralized visibility and selective policy control. CEO Prakash Mana said a single Cloudbrink platform can eliminate a significant portion of the Cisco secure-access stack, arguing that Umbrella, AnyConnect, Secure Access and AI Defense still force enterprises to manage multiple technologies, policies and operating models. The expansion builds on existing deployments, including at one U.S. insurance company where Cloudbrink replaced an environment that included Cisco AnyConnect and Fortinet, moving 300 employees on the first day and more than 600 during the first week, after which remote-connectivity support calls "pretty much disappeared," according to its VP of IT.

The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, together with Thailand Post Company Limited and the Office of the Personal Data Protection Committee, is pressing ahead with the development of the Digital Post ID, or D/ID, a digital delivery code aimed at raising data security in the parcel delivery process. The system replaces the display of full names, addresses and phone numbers on envelopes or parcel boxes with a QR Code, reducing unnecessary exposure of personal data while improving convenience and accuracy in identifying delivery points. Mr. Chaichanok Chidchob, Minister of Digital Economy and Society, said D/ID is one of the key infrastructures that will raise the country's data management to be more secure and ready for future use. Dr. Danant Suphattharaphun, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Thailand Post Company Limited, said Thailand Post has begun piloting D/ID with more than 24,000 of its personnel and plans to expand awareness and trial use to the general public, as well as extend linkages with government agencies, the private sector and various service providers. At present, members of the public can already download D/ID and create their own code for use. Meanwhile, Police Colonel Surapong Plengkam, Secretary-General of the Personal Data Protection Committee, said the PDPC will continue to support and advise Thailand Post, promoting the adoption of Privacy by Design principles and the use of only necessary data from the design stage of systems and services.

IDrive announced on September 14, 2026 that it has added Microsoft Entra ID Backup to its IDrive Microsoft Office 365 Backup solution, extending protection to the identity and access management layer. The new capability automatically backs up critical Entra ID objects and settings to the IDrive cloud, covering users, groups, roles and administrators, administrative units, app registrations, enterprise applications, devices, policies, sign-in logs, audit logs, device configurations, device compliance policies, and BitLocker recovery keys. Key features include frequent automated snapshots, change tracking with historical comparison views, granular and bulk recovery that preserves relationships, point-in-time restore, centralized management of Entra ID and Office 365 backups from a single web console, and AES-256 encrypted storage in the IDrive cloud. The addition complements existing IDrive Microsoft Office 365 Backup support for OneDrive, Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Groups. Microsoft Entra ID Backup is available for $10 per Entra ID seat per year with unlimited storage.

Trust Stamp Inc is expanding its partnership with ID Dataweb, extending the identity verification firm's use of Trust Stamp's biometric tokenization and identity fraud mitigation technology across its enterprise customer base. The expansion builds on three years of joint work serving one of the three largest life insurance providers in the United States, Trust Stamp said. ID Dataweb, a provider of identity threat detection and risk mitigation services, will now use Trust Stamp's technology more broadly across its growing roster of enterprise clients. Trust Stamp's patented Irreversibly Transformed Identity Token technology converts biometric data into tokens that can be revoked, a design meant to reduce the risks of storing raw biometric data while enabling identity verification. Trust Stamp president Andrew Gowasack said expanding the relationship represents an important next step in the company's commercial growth strategy and creates an opportunity to bring its IT2 technology to a broader range of enterprise customers, while ID Dataweb chief operating officer Matt Cochran said the partnership shows the value of combining innovative, privacy-preserving technologies to solve real-world identity challenges.

Salesforce is positioning its Trust Boundary as the definitive architecture for the agentic enterprise at Dreamforce 2026, but the trust stack has not coalesced into a single platform and has instead fractured into three distinct, often incompatible domains: governance specification, runtime authority, and runtime enforcement. Governance specification remains a crowded, nascent field where enterprises cobble together stacks from vendors like Okta, IBM, Broadcom, and Dataiku, a focus supported by the UC Berkeley MAST taxonomy finding that 79% of multi-agent failures trace to specification problems rather than model limitations. Runtime authority is shifting from static permissions to dynamic models, with Akeyless introducing intent-based access control and CrowdStrike pushing SPIFFE-based identities, though Akeyless CEO Oded Hareven says there is still no single place issuing, governing, and revoking that authority. Runtime enforcement, the domain of bidirectional API security and agent fabrics, was recently exemplified by the expanded integration between Akamai and MuleSoft, and matters because 87% of organizations reported an API security incident in 2025. Despite the marketing at Dreamforce, no single vendor covers all three layers, and the unified solution is in practice a multi-vendor assembly project, a fragmentation that feeds a merchant readiness paradox in which 42% of merchants are testing agentic systems while only 3% of transactions actually involve agents. Gartner warns that 40% of autonomous AI efforts will be partially derailed by governance gaps discovered only after production incidents, and with Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face and Stripe's $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, the industry's largest acquirers are buying routing infrastructure at premium valuations, signaling that the orchestration layer's fragmentation is itself the margin risk.

Okta shares have returned +10.4% over the past month, outpacing the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2% change, while the Zacks Security industry, to which Okta belongs, lost 7.8% over the same period. The cloud identity management company is expected to post earnings of $0.93 per share for the current quarter, a year-over-year change of +13.4%, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate has moved +6.2% over the last 30 days. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $3.93 indicates a year-over-year change of +12.3% and has changed +9.8% over the last 30 days, while the next fiscal year's consensus estimate of $4.44 indicates a change of +13% and has changed +3.5% over the past month. Okta's consensus sales estimate of $815.52 million for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +9.9%, with the $3.22 billion and $3.55 billion estimates for the current and next fiscal years indicating changes of +10.4% and +10.1%, respectively. In the last reported quarter, Okta reported revenues of $805 million, up +10.6% year over year, and EPS of $1.05 versus $0.91 a year ago, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $792.14 million by +1.62% on revenue and by +9.38% on EPS; the company is rated Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and graded F on the Zacks Value Style Score.