Communication System Engineer

Passwordless at scale: what KuppingerCole's 2026 Leadership Compass validate across Enterprise and consumer identity. June 30, 2026 The 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass - Passwordless Authentication B2C and Passwordless Authentication for Enterprise - validate a reality many organizations are already confronting: implementing passwordless authentication at scale requires more than introducing passkeys in isolation. It demands architectural flexibility, strong cryptographic foundations, and the ability to support diverse users, devices, and regulatory environments - consistently and securely. Across both enterprise and consumer markets, KuppingerCole's latest assessments independently confirm the importance of a portfolio-level approach to passwordless authentication. In its 2026 Leadership Compass, KuppingerCole names Thales a Leader across both enterprise and consumer passwordless authentication for the third consecutive year, a recognition that reflects not only product strength, but Thales's ability to operationalize passwordless authentication across real-world identity ecosystems. Explore KuppingerCole's 2026 Passwordless Authentication Leadership Compass reports. See why Thales was named a Leader in both the Enterprise and B2C Passwordless Authentication Leadership Compass reports, and learn how a portfolio-based approach can help organizations scale passwordless authentication across workforce, partner, and customer identity journeys. Passwordless 360°: the framework behind the recognitionline here. Central to the Thales recognition is Passwordless 360°, a structured, holistic approach to implementing passwordless authentication at scale. While many organizations have introduced passwordless methods, these deployments are often fragmented and built around isolated use cases or specific authenticators. This limits their ability to scale and deliver a consistent user experience and security outcomes. Passwordless 360° is designed to address this challenge by aligning identity, risk, and authentication strategies into a unified model. It encompasses: * Defining the user ecosystem - workforce, partner, and customer access journeys * Mapping risk-based authentication types to each user population * Conducting gap analysis against the current authentication posture * Building the path to achieve transformational results on UX, security, and cost efficiencies The framework is designed to help organizations leverage modern FIDO passkeys while preserving existing investments in legacy authentication infrastructure, a practical consideration for enterprises managing complex, hybrid identity environments. The importance of a broad authenticator portfolio. Across both enterprise and consumer passwordless markets, the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass reports highlight Thales's ability to design and manufacture its own authenticators as a key differentiator. Support for FIDO2, passkeys, and modern authentication standards is now expected across vendors. Thales, however, produces its own FIDO2 hardware security keys, PKI-based smart cards and tokens enabling tighter control over allowed token types in regulated environments. Enterprise: control as a requirement, not a preference. In the Passwordless Authentication for Enterprise report, KuppingerCole identifies Thales's hardware authenticator manufacturing capability as a key differentiator, particularly in regulated and security-sensitive environments. Organizations must be able to define and enforce which authenticators are allowed, how credentials are bound to devices, and how assurance levels are maintained across different user populations. Thales' vertically integrated approach enables this level of control directly, rather than relying on external authenticator ecosystems. As phishing-resistant authentication has become a baseline expectation, this control is critical for security, compliance, and operational consistency. B2C: extending the same assurance to consumer identity. The same benefits apply to Thales's consumer identity offering. In the Passwordless Authentication for B2C Leadership Compass, KuppingerCole highlights deep integration between Thales OneWelcome Identity Platform and Thales secure hardware and cryptographic technologies, including FIDO authenticators, as a key strength, extending hardware-backed assurance into consumer-facing deployments. This integration means Thales applies the same hardware-backed assurance model used in enterprise environments to consumer-facing applications. In practice, this means organizations can deliver consistent authentication across both workforce and customer experiences - even in large-scale, unmanaged environments. Flexible deployment options to fit enterprise needs. KuppingerCole's Passwordless Authentication for Enterprise Leadership Compass positions deployment flexibility as a first-order evaluation criterion. While many organizations position passwordless as cloud-first, the enterprise reality is more complex. Large organizations operate across cloud, on-premises, and legacy systems, constrained by data residency, regulatory obligations, and business continuity requirements. In sectors such as banking & financial services, healthcare, government, defence, and critical infrastructure, authentication cannot always depend on cloud connectivity. Deployment flexibility, therefore, becomes a prerequisite for scale. Passwordless authentication must function consistently across environments and remain operational during network or cloud disruptions. KuppingerCole highlights Thales's support for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures, alongside an access continuum model that preserves on-premises authentication during outages - directly addressing enterprise requirements for resilience and sovereignty. What multi-brand / multi-tenant support brings to consumer authentication. Consumer identity at scale is structurally different from enterprise IAM. Organizations across sectors such as banking, retail, and telecommunications must manage tens of millions of identities across multiple brands, geographies, and regulations simultaneously. In these contexts, multi-brand and multi-tenant architecture is essential for managing passwordless authentication consistently and at scale. Without it, identity systems fragment. Separate stacks per brand or region introduce duplication, inconsistent user experiences, and increased operational risk. They also make it harder to enforce consistent security and compliance controls across markets. The 2026 KuppingerCole Passwordless Authentication for B2C Leadership Compass recognizes Thales's support for multi-brand and multi-tenant deployments alongside scalable identity workflows - including self-registration, consent management, and social login - designed to operate at high volume and availability. The regulatory dimension is particularly significant. Organizations operating across the EU must comply with regulations such as GDPR and eIDAS, often across multiple jurisdictions. A multi-tenant architecture directly addresses these requirements. It enables centralized enforcement of consent, identity assurance, and data handling policies, while allowing each brand or market to accommodate local regulatory variation without standing up separate infrastructure. Security controls remain consistent across the entire estate, and compliance reporting becomes auditable at the organizational level rather than brand by brand. Leading across Enterprise and consumer markets. Recognition in both Leadership Compass reports reflects what Thales delivers in practice - an identity portfolio capable of securing workforce, partner, and consumer authentication at scale, across deployment models and authenticator form factors. See the full Passwordless Authentication evaluation. Download the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass reports to compare passwordless authentication capabilities across enterprise and consumer identity, including deployment flexibility, authenticator support, and scalability.

Securing AI at scale: Thales joins the HPE Unleash AI ecosystem. June 25, 2026 AI innovation is moving faster than AI Security. AI is moving fast. What started as experimentation is quickly becoming a real-world deployment across nearly every industry. But as organizations scale AI initiatives, many are realizing that innovation alone is not enough. Trust, governance, and security are now among the biggest challenges in enterprise AI adoption. From protecting sensitive training data and securing AI pipelines to defending against prompt injection and maintaining compliance across hybrid environments, security teams are being asked to move just as fast as AI innovation itself. At the same time, they still need to maintain control over sensitive data, enforce governance policies, and reduce operational risk. Bringing data-centric security to the HPE Unleash AI Partner Program. That's why joining the HPE Unleash AI partner program feels like such a natural next step for Thales. The HPE Unleash AI partner program is a curated ecosystem, combining ISV solutions that go through comprehensive validation testing with engineered HPE AI systems, including HPE Private Cloud AI and the broader HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA solutions, to deliver the performance, security, and scalability enterprises need for production AI. Through this collaboration, Thales and HPE are working together to strengthen AI security and compliance across data, infrastructure, pipelines, AI applications, and emerging agentic AI environments. Thales has long been a strategic security partner for HPE, with integrations spanning HPE compute, storage, networking, and hybrid cloud solutions. Together, Thales help customers address growing requirements around security, sovereignty, governance, and compliance across hybrid environments. Joining the HPE Unleash AI partner program represents the next step in that collaboration, extending its work further into enterprise AI. By integrating turnkey, sovereign, and at scale solutions from the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio, the Thales AI Security Fabric can help protect customers' sensitive data and intellectual property while maintaining visibility, governance, and control across AI deployments. "Organizations are moving quickly to operationalize AI, but trust, governance, and security must scale alongside innovation," said Robin Braun, Vice President of AI Business Development, Hybrid Cloud, HPE. "Through the HPE Unleash AI Partner Program, collaborations with partners like Thales help organizations build AI environments that protect sensitive data, strengthen compliance, and accelerate responsible AI adoption across hybrid and private cloud environments." Securing AI across data, pipelines, applications, and infrastructure. AI adoption is also expanding the enterprise attack surface in new ways. Companies now face risks tied to prompt injection, data leakage, insecure AI pipelines, model poisoning or misuse, and unauthorized access to underlying sensitive data. At the same time, evolving regulations and sovereignty requirements are increasing the need for stronger governance and visibility across AI deployments. To help address these challenges, Thales and HPE bring together: * NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio is designed for scalable AI deployments from enterprises to model builders and sovereigns. * Thales AI Security Fabric capabilities spanning data protection, runtime AI security, encryption/tokenization, centralized key management, secrets management, and hardware-rooted trust * Centralized governance and policy enforcement across hybrid, sovereign, air-gapped, and multi-cloud environments Built on a data-centric security approach, Thales AI Security Fabric helps secure AI systems from data ingestion to inference and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Through integrated capabilities including CipherTrust Data Security Platform (CDSP), Thales Luna Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), and Imperva AI Application Security, enterprises can apply more consistent protection across AI pipelines, workloads, models, and user interactions. But securing AI is not just about deploying another security tool. It's about giving teams the confidence to move faster without losing control of their data, policies, or governance standards. As AI becomes more embedded in everyday business operations, security can't become a bottleneck to innovation. Thales AI Security use-cases for HPE Unleash AI. Real-World AI Security use cases. One of the things I find most interesting about enterprise AI right now is that every company seems to be asking the same question in different ways: "How do we move faster with AI without creating new security and compliance risks?" These challenges show up across almost every part of the AI environment, from protecting training data and securing pipelines to governing AI applications and maintaining control in highly regulated environments. Through the HPE Unleash AI partner program, Thales has validated several AI security use cases with HPE to help address these real-world challenges, including: Centralized key management with hardware root of trust. As AI deployments expand across hybrid, private cloud, and multi-cloud environments, enterprises need consistent control over encryption keys and security policies. Thales helps centralize key management and policy enforcement, strengthening governance and compliance through hardware-rooted trust. Trusted AI data repositories. AI models rely on curated datasets that must be protected from unauthorized access, insider threats, tampering, and data poisoning. Thales secures AI datasets across storage, databases, and compute infrastructure through encryption, centralized key management, and policy enforcement to safeguard sensitive training data and intellectual property. Secure AI pipelines for regulated data. Organizations in industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government often need to use regulated data, including PII and PHI, in AI workflows. Thales helps de-identify sensitive data before it enters AI pipelines, enabling teams to build and analyze AI models while reducing privacy and compliance risks. Protect Kubernetes Persistent Storage. Containerized AI workloads on Kubernetes often rely on persistent storage, which can be vulnerable to unauthorized access or privilege escalation. Thales helps secure persistent volumes with encryption and policy-based access controls, ensuring only authorized workloads can access sensitive data. AI guardrails and prompt injection protection. Enterprise applications using LLMs are increasingly exposed to risks such as prompt injection, jailbreak attacks, malicious prompts, and unintended data leakage. Thales helps inspect prompts and responses in real time to detect unsafe activity and prevent misuse before requests reach sensitive models. Secure secrets for AI pipelines. AI workflows often rely on API keys, credentials, and tokens to connect models, datasets, and services. Thales helps securely store and inject credentials into AI pipelines without embedding secrets directly in code, prompts, or repositories. Building trusted AI environments. Together, Thales and HPE are enabling enterprises to build AI environments that are scalable, secure, and designed with governance in mind from the start. By combining HPE's enterprise AI infrastructure with Thales AI Security Fabric's data-centric capabilities, customers can better protect sensitive information while maintaining visibility and control across AI deployments. This approach helps customers: * Protect sensitive AI training and inference data * Secure AI applications against prompt injection and misuse * Centralize encryption key management across AI environments * Strengthen compliance and audit readiness * Support sovereign and air-gapped AI deployments * Reduce operational complexity through unified security controls "AI is reshaping how organizations innovate, operate, and compete, but the success of AI ultimately depends on trust," said Todd Moore, Global VP of Data Security Products at Thales. "Organizations need confidence that their data, models, and AI interactions are protected in increasingly complex environments. In collaboration with HPE, we enable organizations to accelerate AI adoption without sacrificing governance, security, and control." What's next. Beyond AI, Thales and HPE continue to collaborate across a broad range of security initiatives spanning compute, storage, networking, hybrid cloud, and data protection. To learn more about Thales and HPE's collaboration, explore these resources, or feel free to contact me directly. These are conversations I'm having with customers and partners every day, and I'm always happy to connect and exchange ideas around AI security and data protection. For further information: * Watch its video live from HPE Discover 2026 HERE. * Read HPE's new article explaining how Unleash AI pushes enterprise-grade AI deployment beyond the pilot phase HERE. * Watch the new HPE Private Cloud AI Demo Video: Unleash AI: Protect Kubernetes Persistent Storage HERE.

Thales, Dutch mod expand radar production capacity in the Netherlands. Thales and the Dutch Ministry of Defence have signed an agreement to expand radar production and testing infrastructure in the Netherlands. The initiative will focus on Thales' facilities in Hengelo, in the eastern part of the country, and include the construction of new testing and manufacturing infrastructure. Planned investments include a near-field radar test site equipped with an anechoic chamber, expanded production capacity for complex printed circuit boards, and an additional radar test tower. The agreement also provides for the development of training facilities. Thales expects the project to increase antenna production capacity by 60 percent between this year and 2028. "Due to the rapid technological developments and the deteriorating global security situation, the Dutch Ministry of Defence has identified an urgent need to increase the availability and scalability of critical radar capabilities for the protection of the Netherlands and Europe," stated the company. Recent Programs The agreement follows several recent Thales programs spanning missile systems, unmanned platforms, and defense manufacturing initiatives. Earlier this month, the company partnered with South Korea's Hanwha Aerospace to explore integrating Chunmoo guided rockets and missiles into the X-Fire launcher, a modular long-range fires system designed to support multiple munition types. Thales has also joined forces with French aerospace company AURA AERO on the Enbata medium-altitude, long-endurance drone program. The platform will incorporate Thales' AirMaster C radar to support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Separately, the company signed a deal with Renault Group to industrialize production of the Toutatis loitering munition. The project combines Thales' defense technologies with Renault's manufacturing expertise and aims to significantly increase France's domestic drone production capacity. * The Defense Post