ForgeRock Software Release 7.5: Harness the full potential of the integrated Ping Identity Platform

In today’s competitive environment, businesses heavily rely on a robust identity and access management (IAM) platform to attract and maintain customers and ensure protection for the organization and its customers from cyberthreats. Central to this strategy is the provision of a comprehensive suite of IAM tools and resources. These resources are critical for the seamless creation and management of secure and compliant applications. The accessibility of these tools from a single provider simplifies management for administrators and empowers developers to efficiently build secure solutions.

Together as one combined Ping Identity, we are committed to supporting, developing, and innovating the core platforms for Ping and ForgeRock to deliver the most robust IAM offering available to benefit our customers. In support of this mission, it is with great enthusiasm that Ping Identity unveils the ForgeRock Software version 7.5. This release includes a host of innovative features designed to empower our self-managed software customers. It enables organizations to integrate and leverage more of the Ping capabilities within the combined portfolio of IAM services, elevates security and compliance measures, and enhances the experiences of developers and administrators. The ForgeRock Software Version 7.5 release includes:

• ForgeRock Access Management 7.5

• ForgeRock Identity Management 7.5

• ForgeRock Directory Services 7.5 

• ForgeRock Identity Gateway 2024.3 

The ability for developers to leverage a comprehensive set of tools and services allows them to build applications that create both exceptional and secure user experiences. The 7.5 release of ForgeRock Self-Managed Software incorporates several features that make it easier for organizations to take advantage of the range of capabilities and services available across the Ping Identity Platform. 

Enhancing security and reducing fraud is essential to every application. With the new PingOne Protect node, organizations can easily implement a comprehensive fraud prevention strategy that protects user accounts and ensures regulatory compliance. Adding PingOne Protect services to their existing ForgeRock Software capabilities allows organizations to leverage risk predictors and journey routing based on calculated risk scores, helping organizations to identify and mitigate account takeover, new account fraud, and MFA fatigue.

Another key addition that enables organizations to quickly and easily leverage the identity and access management capabilities in PingOne is the PingOne connector. This out-of-the-box connector allows Identity Management to synchronize identity data with PingOne environments. And, it eliminates the need for custom development and streamlines the integration process.

We’ve established that simplicity and flexibility are essential to developing secure and exceptional user experiences. With the integration to PingOne SSO in the latest Identity Gateway release, PingOne customers can now enforce SSO using Identity Gateway. With this feature, organizations can optimize their identity and access management strategy by selecting the identity provider that best suits their specific needs and requirements. 

With the ever-growing threat landscape, security and compliance remain a top priority. The 7.5 release introduces significant advancements in these aspects, bolstering capabilities that strengthen protection and compliance with industry standards and regulations, including secrets management, SAML artifact binding, and integration of Windows Desktop SSO.

Secrets, such as passwords and cryptographic keys, and certificates are critical to the security of any system. The secrets management capabilities in the 7.5 release allow for fast and automatic rotation of secrets throughout the platform, ensuring that they are always fresh and cannot be easily compromised. Credential pairs (e.g. usernames and passwords) can be managed as a single entity and thus rotated as one. Additionally, secrets can now be read directly from secret stores without service interruption. This eliminates the need to manually manage secrets, reducing the risk of human error and improving overall system security.

SAML Artifact Binding is a new feature that secures SAML communication between ForgeRock Software and other applications. SAML is a widely used protocol for exchanging authentication and authorization information between identity providers and service providers. Artifact binding provides an additional layer of security by preventing eavesdropping and replay attacks. This feature is particularly important for organizations that need to meet strict compliance requirements posed by electronic identification schemes such as eHerkenning in the Netherlands.

The 7.5 release also introduces a new, more secure authentication flow that allows workforce users to sign into their Windows Desktop and then seamlessly authenticate to the PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud (formerly ForgeRock Identity Cloud). With the help of a locally deployed Identity Gateway, Kerberos tokens remain in the Window’s domain and are not transferred to Cloud.

Accelerating time-to-value is crucial for successful deployments, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment. The latest release, version 7.5, focuses on enhancing the developer and administrator experience to achieve this goal. 

Custom relationships have been added to simplify the process of building scalable data models when using Directory Services as the identity management (IDM) repository. This allows administrators to leverage out-of-the-box extensibility options for defining custom relationships using pre-built reference entities in Directory Services, improving efficiency and reducing the time and effort required for data modeling that scales to meet business needs.

In addition to custom relationships, scalability is enhanced with the introduction of NextGen IoT. Utilizing a standards-based OAuth approach, organizations can register and maintain IoT devices and things for hundreds, thousands or millions of OAuth 2.0 clients at scale without the need for extensive customization, or impacting performance or functionality. This simplifies the process of connecting and managing IoT devices, hardens security with granular client configuration for devices, and delivers a more personalized experience for end users in IoT use cases. Ultimately enabling organizations to realize the benefits of their deployments more easily and effectively.

These enhancements provide just a glimpse into our unrelenting focus on providing our customers with the most comprehensive identity and access management platform available and Ping Identity’s commitment to empowering organizations to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and achieve their business goals more securely and quickly. 

Read our release notes, explore the full 7.5 product documentation, and download the software to discover more of the features available in the ForgeRock Software 7.5 release. Keep in mind that many of the features in the 7.5 release are already available in the PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud. The cloud service is designed to assist customers who prefer a turnkey SaaS offering that extends the same benefits available to our self-managed software customers.