Just like every year, Slush Helsinki 2019 was a great conference with lots of lasers and other light effects, a secret garden and of course many start-ups and scale-ups presenting their latest innovations. Ranging from electric boats, gaming, revolutionizing delivery trucks, accelerating recovery, platformised property management, conversational technologies, securing creative rights in a privacy-friendly way, to custom socks as merchandise.
We also met with a number of startups that are more related to nextAuth. Within this space of Identity and Access Management (IAM), nextAuth was the only one at slush focusing on authentication while others focus on identity: Agrello, Freja eID, Keyless, AuthMe, Hive.id.
The difference in focus makes that identity-centric solutions typically are centralized solutions, one verified identity that can be used everywhere. By contrast, nextAuth is a technology provider, allowing companies to build in the authentication of their users within the company’s universe, providing a much richer user experience. Both models have their merit:
- identity-centric solutions are mainly of interest to service providers where users only authenticate occasionally or as an onboarding mechanism, to do the initial validation of identity (e.g., have a complete online KYC). In terms of user experience, the user will always be confronted with the third-party identity solution. The main caveat of these solutions is that there needs to be a critical mass of potential users for the service providers in order to be useful. nextAuth can be a technology provider to identity-centric solutions, which require authentication as a critical building block.
- being in control of your users’ authentication, fully integrated into your environment, is mainly of interest to service providers where users authenticate on a regular basis. After the initial enrolment, which happens only once, the user is simply authenticated as being the same user again. The user is not confronted with a third-party solution. nextAuth can provide the technology for building your own authentication.
