If you’ve made it past the headline, I imagine you are on your journey to determine the Identity & Access Management Solution best suited for your organization. Clearly, this is a major decision that can make or break any company. I also imagine, that unless this is day one of your journey, you’ve already been a part of countless sales pitches, proof-of-concept meetings, and solutioning. You may even be close to signing the dotted line, but need one last push to make you feel comfortable in your next big step towards a highly secure environment.
Why Okta?
If you’ve shopped around, you are probably already aware that many of the major competitors in the IAM space have the ability, more-or-less, to address your needs. So, what separates Okta? Over the past 3 years, I’ve been privileged to work for an MISP (Managed Identity Service Provider) that focuses on what Okta has built. So, while I may be biased, I’m also very aware of the benefits Okta has over its peers.
User-Experience
Hands-down this is my key talking point whenever I am describing Okta. Whether you are a super-user with access to a company’s entire app portfolio or you’re just checking emails, the user-experience is bar-none the best available. It’s not that Okta’s design or layout is easy to navigate – it is. It’s that it is flexible and customizable, and the user experience can be tailored to your company’s unique end-user. A staggering amount of the organizations we deploy Okta with have user-bases that are change averse, sometimes to the extreme. Will they know how to login? Will they be logged out of everything and forced to password reset? How many support tickets am I going to have to deal with? The list goes on. The question is, what do you want it to be? While I can’t say for certain that the options are limitless, I can say that of the 400+ deployments my team has done over the past 2 years alone, we’ve yet to run into a scenario that couldn’t be accomplished. With the right experts guiding you through your deployment of Okta, your users may not even know there is a massive change going on behind the scenes.
Developer Friendly, but Easily Configurable
Some solutions may require heavy development up front or even continuous development to maintain and expand. While that may be feasible for many organizations and even desired, there is also a growing market of companies with the desire to plug-n-play their chosen software. Your company may not need to integrate legacy, on-prem applications or you may have the need for custom login pages to secure your front-end users. While Okta can fill this role, it is also easily configurable to the start-up that was born in the cloud. At the time of writing, Okta has over 7,000 pre-configured applications, and this grows daily. The “Flash-To-Bang” for Okta can be extremely quick for many of our customers. One of the core reasons the Commercial arm within BeyondID was able to deploy over 400 instances of Okta in ~2 years is not solely due to our own expertise as much as I’d like to claim that. It’s due to Okta’s ever-expanding catalog of pre-configured applications and ease of stand-up. In many cases, we can take a company with zero previous IAM solution and implement Okta within a few weeks, rather than months or years. And if a company is switching providers, we also maintain a growing consultant group with “Rip & Replace” experience.
Complementary Technologies
Okta is not the end-all, be-all for security, nor should it be. The technology and team behind it are hyper-focused on being the #1 Identity Platform, and specifically the last 4 years, is rated at or near the top (see below, Forrester Wave IDaaS report and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management).
Okta plays friendly with its adjacent markets and platforms rather than trying to be all things to all people. While it may expand its capabilities with consistent feature enhancements and acquisitions such as Auth0, it is also compatible with complementary technologies. To name a few, BeyondID has placed focus on use-cases where identity proofing is necessary to securing a company’s environment and we have chosen to partner with Onfido. Or, in the case of using micro-segmentation as a security strategy, Illumio is a clear winner, and also makes the leaderboard with Forrester. The list goes on, but the key is to know what you are good at and be the best in class. Then, partner with the premier adjacent technologies. Okta, along with BeyondID, is doing just that.
While there are numerous aspects to choosing the Identity Platform for your company, these 3 stand out among the rest from my perspective. Lastly, remember, the next security breach isn’t going to wait on you. Choose wisely.
