Why should you use privacyIDEA?
Are you an IT administrator or CTO looking for a solution that enables you to secure your employees’ access flexibly and efficiently? In this article, we would like to explain the advantages of privacyIDEA and the support provided by NetKnights, without going into technical details. You can find out more about the development process, contact persons, data protection and our support.
Development process
The privacyIDEA core development team consists of seven full-time developers whose sole task is to further develop privacyIDEA (as of 2024). This enables continuous development of the system and ensures consistent code quality and coding style. This is the basis for the long-term further development of privacyIDEA.
There are ideas, issues and milestones maintained on GitHub so that everyone can follow the roadmap and future developments.
In the privacyIDEA project there is a detailed description of how others can participate in the development, documentation or translation of privacyIDEA.
At first thought, the process may seem very restrictive – but it serves to ensure the above-mentioned code quality. This should ensure maintainable code for decades to come.
If you want to use appropriate software, ask yourself the questions:
- How many full-time developers are working on the solution?
- How transparent is the roadmap?
- How neat and comprehensible is the code? – This is an indication of how well the software can be extended in the future and whether there will be any problems with regression errors.
- How is it ensured that the software will still be developed in five or ten years’ time?
- How is the development process regulated?
- Who pays for the further development of the software?
Contact person
Due to privacyIDEA’s full-time developers, there is a dedicated contact person for privacyIDEA. If you have problems, if you have questions or feature requests, if you want to know or influence where the development is going, you know whom to talk to.
Of course, you can also do this yourself according to the above-mentioned contribution process or commission others to do so.
The contact person for privacyIDEA will also be able to provide you with information about authorizations for repositories and make statements about data protection or legal aspects.
If you want to use appropriate software, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who can you get a reliable statement about the software from?
- Who is responsible for the software?
- Who is responsible for data protection?
- Who can guarantee whether the software will develop in a certain direction?
Userbase
privacyIDEA has been on the market since 2014. There is now a wide user base. Committed people translate the software into different languages, publish videos on YouTube or howtos on LinkedIn.
We know that privacyIDEA is used in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia in installations with tens of thousands of users in some cases.
The Ubuntu repository for the software receives around 1500 downloads from different IP addresses every day.
The privacyIDEA Authenticator has 100,000+ installations in the Google Playstore.
If you want to use appropriate software, ask yourself the following questions:
- How much interest is there in the world for this software to exist?
- How many people are actively using this software?
- How many installations are there? Shodan.io may not always be the best source for this, as such systems are often not accessible from the Internet.
Scenarios
privacyIDEA aims to be a centralized authentication management system that is independent of the respective application. privacyIDEA or the developers behind privacyIDEA are not directly connected to other applications, IdM or IdPs. Thus privacyIDEA pursues the goal of being able to cover any scenario. Be it authentication to Keycloak, ADFS, Windows, or RADIUS VPNs…
The aim of privacyIDEA is that all such applications can be connected with little effort. Business logic is implemented in the server. Application plug-ins remain lean on the code side. This enables privacyIDEA users to quickly change or expand applications as required.
Furthermore, privacyIDEA considers different authentication methods to be equally valid. There are scenarios in which OTP makes sense.
There are scenarios in which OTP is too weak and WebAuthn is better. There are scenarios in which a TAN list may need to be printed.
If you are looking at the relevant software, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the multi-factor solution specialized for a particular application and could this cause you problems in the future?
- Do you know that all users can be served with the same type of authentication?
- Do you need the flexibility to sometimes make an exception to the rule?
Support
privacyIDEA is open source. You can use the software without making any commitments or paying license fees. You can download, install and use the software without being consulted, without having to register or anything similar.
But what happens if you have a problem?
privacyIDEA is developed by full-time employees at NetKnights who solely focus on developing privacyIDEA. NetKnights offers support contracts with SLAs at a fixed price and is able to look into the code and fix errors centrally, not just in your installation.
This again eliminates regression errors.
If you want to use appropriate open source software, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who provides you with support for the software?
- Are there appropriate response times for the support?
- What does the support involve?
- What is the relationship between the company providing you with support and the software used?
- How much experience do the people providing support have with the software and the code?
About the support provided by NetKnights
You are using privacyIDEA. Why should you get support from NetKnights?
The financials and SLA
With NetKnights you receive flat-rate support. For a fixed price per year, all support requests are covered. This means that for a fixed price you can be sure that privacyIDEA will continue to run in the way it is currently installed and that NetKnights will support you in case of problems, at agreed times, without hidden costs.
If you want to buy support for privacyIDEA from a company, ask yourself the questions:
- Are the support cases you are allowed to purchase limited?
- Will you incur additional costs for any major problems or many problems?
- Are response times guaranteed?
Compliance and liability
With support/SLA, NetKnights also assumes compliance and liability because it has control over the code. This means that NetKnights, as the supporting company, knows the code that you are running on-prem and you can hold NetKnights responsible for this code.
If you want to buy support for privacyIDEA from a company, ask yourself the questions:
If you want to buy support for privacyIDEA from a company, ask yourself the questions:
- Who has control over the code of the privacyIDEA system that you have installed?
- Can your support provider assume liability for this code and, if necessary, adapt the code accordingly so that this does not lead to problems with updates?
- Does your supporting company have corporate liability insurance or professional liability insurance?
- How high is the liability cover?
Developer and further development of privacyIDEA
NetKnights also invests the money for support in the further development of privacyIDEA. You and other users usually do not have to pay extra for the development of new functions.
Some support levels include the prioritized handling of feature requests.
The NetKnights employ the core developers of privacyIDEA, so that they can fully concentrate on the further development of privacyIDEA. The developers implement new features, fix bugs and talk to consultants and support staff about how privacyIDEA can become even better.
If you want to buy support from a privacyIDEA company, ask yourself the questions:
If you want to buy support from a privacyIDEA company, ask yourself the questions:
- To what extent can or do you want to support the further development of privacyIDEA?
- To what extent does your supporter support the further development of privacyIDEA?
- In what form does privacyIDEA continue to develop or can you influence it via your supporter?
- How do you ensure that your concerns from your company are incorporated into the further development of privacyIDEA?
Know-How Transfer
NetKnights offers its customers a German and an English release webinar after each release. Customers can participate live and ask questions during the webinar. Customers who were unable to attend can watch the recording of the webinar.
NetKnights also provides a knowledge base. Here, customers can find how-tos or deep-dive articles on specific topics that explain certain contexts in depth.
NetKnights organizes a privacyIDEA Summit, at which the planned further development of privacyIDEA is presented and privacyIDEA users have the opportunity to exchange ideas with each other.
Of course, NetKnights also offers paid consulting services and training.
If you want to buy privacyIDEA services from a company, ask yourself the following questions:
- What services are included and what has to be paid extra again and again?
- How open is the service provider to passing on know-how to you?
- What opportunities do you have to exchange ideas with other customers of the service provider?
Support Team
In addition to developers and consultants, NetKnights employs dedicated support staff. A total of 13 technicians who work exclusively with privacyIDEA – on average for 3.5 years (as of 10/24), so that 45 years of experience with privacyIDEA come together here.
The dedicated support staff deal with installation issues for over 200 customers and also have direct access to the development know-how.
If you want to buy support for privacyIDEA from a company, ask yourself the following questions:
- What do the support staff do all day? Are they experts or generalists?
- What opportunities do the support staff have to understand the privacyIDEA code, get it explained and thus identify and solve deeper problems?
- Are the support staff familiar with the data protection aspects of the privacyIDEA installation?
We hope we have been able to clarify open questions about our privacyIDEA software and our support offer with this article.
