A week into 2019, Akamai Technologies Inc. has already made its first acquisition of the year.

The cybersecurity and content delivery heavyweight today announced that it has picked up Janrain Inc., a Portland-based identity management provider. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price tag was likely fairly substantial: Janrain had raised more than $70 million in funding and counts dozens of global enterprises as customers.

The company sells a platform that helps organizations manage user access to their online services. The Janrain Identity Cloud, as it’s called, provides tools for processing account registrations and logins along with a portal where administrators can organize users’ profile data.

But it’s the security features layered on top that caught Akamai’s attention. Janrain Identity Cloud verifies that users are whom they claim to be by analyzing their location, the device from which they try to access an application and other activity data. If someone, say, tries to log into an account from a new phone at an unusual time of day, the platform could block the request until more proof of identity is provided.

This kind of adaptive security is proving increasingly necessary in the era of large-scale data breaches.

“A 2017 Pew Research survey reported that 39 percent of all users employ the same or very similar passwords across online accounts,” Akamai Chief Technology Officer John Summers wrote in a blog post. “From a website owner’s perspective, this leads to a huge digital trust problem — just because someone or something presents the correct credentials, how can the business trust that it is truly the account owner that is attempting to log in?”

The capabilities that Janrain brings to the table should enable Akamai to mitigate this threat for its enterprise customers. The technology will complement Akamai’s Bot Manager service, which helps companies block web traffic from nonhuman sources such as scripts used by hackers to abuse stolen login credentials.

Akamai has been expanding its security portfolio as part of an effort to drive new revenue growth. The company’s security unit increased sales last quarter by 37 percent, to $169 million, easily beating the single-digit growth recorded by its core web content and media delivery units. Akamai might potentially pursue more acquisitions in 2019 to boost this relatively small but increasingly important part of its business. 

Image: Akamai