Closing the Innovation Gap

The rate of change in technology is surpassing businesses’ ability to keep up. The investment your company made in Yammer three years ago is obsolete today thanks to Slack. Your on-prem servers won’t scale for more than a few weeks (how will we catch our Pokemon Go?) and if you didn’t invest in mobile and cloud technology early on, you may be considering buying a tiny five-year-old competitor for $1B dollars — see: Unilever and Dollar Shave Club. Businesses that don’t adapt to the rapidly changing world are being left in the dust by businesses that do.

There is much written about the personal digital divide — the gulf between people who have ready access to computers, mobile phones, and the Internet, and people who don’t. Since business are organizations made of people, it raises the question: what does the fissure look like for businesses that can’t — or fail to — invest in the most transformative technologies of our time?

We’re watching this innovation gap start to widen. Businesses and organizations are falling onto two sides of their own digital divide — those who transform their business with cloud and mobile technologies to improve efficiency and productivity, and those who don’t. Not only are companies failing to invest in new technologies, the technologies they’ve invested in previously aren’t increasing the output of their employees and partners, and the experiences of their customers.

Okta’s promise has always been to help you fulfill your mission as quickly as possible — to narrow the innovation gap for your business or organization. Today, at Oktane16, we’re announcing a new strategic partnership, new capabilities and an entirely new product designed to increase the productivity, effectiveness, and security of your IT teams, developer teams, employees, partners, and customers:

• Diane Greene joined me on the stage at Oktane16 today to announce that Okta and Google have expanded our partnership to bring identity to the enterprise. Okta is a preferred identity partner for the enterprise, and Google + Okta will jointly deliver a flexible multi-cloud reference architecture enabling enterprises to securely deploy and manage access to best-of-breed enterprise cloud applications.
• The new Okta API Access Management product is designed to reduce the time, effort, maintenance, and security prowess a company needs to secure the critical data being transferred by APIs between anything your business or customers need (apps, services, devices, even the technologies of the future). Unlike legacy point solutions, access is managed based on the user, making it easy to centrally maintain one identity and one set of permissions for any employee, customer, or partner across every point of access, regardless of location or device type.
• Okta’s new solution, Okta Contextual Access Management, ties a trilogy of Okta products together to deliver the right set of apps and services to the right person at the right time based on context. IT leaders can now investigate, remediate and step-up security based on context from a unified data set of vendor-neutral integrations spanning cloud, mobile and networking infrastructure, an expansive set of devices, and even device trust from third party systems and MDMs.
• Major upgrades to Okta’s Lifecycle Management product (formerly Okta Provisioning) allow businesses to automate and protect the varied lifecycles and states of a fluid internal workforce and stakeholder ecosystem. The product adds new workflows, audit reporting, and collaboration capabilities.

Businesses are not alone in experiencing the innovation gap. Organizations with the most need — nonprofits — also lack the applications and infrastructure needed to get their best work done securely. To assist nonprofits in their critical missions, we also announced that Okta is formally committed to Pledge 1%, joining companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Splunk and Box in an effort to support our community. We’re giving every product in the Okta Identity Cloud away to any nonprofit for free, for up to 25 employees. And, the people who work at Okta are making our own commitment to volunteerism and service. All Okta employees now have an annual day to volunteer at a nonprofit or cause they care about.

We measure our own success by how successful our customers are— whether they’re large, global enterprises like Pitney Bowes, Flex, Engie or News Corp, or local nonprofits like the Global Fund for Women and the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula. We look forward to helping every customer do their most significant work.