Oktane20: Freedom

Over the last few weeks, COVID-19 has impacted every facet of our lives: the way we work, interact with family and friends, and how we spend our time. While I wish we were together this week, nothing is more important to us than your health, and the health of the Okta team. I hope that as you attend your first ever digital Oktane (our first Oktane Live!), you’ll have the chance to learn and share, and know that we are all in this together. We are so thankful that you’re joining us today, and hope all of you are staying healthy.

This year’s theme is freedom. At Okta, we believe that you need the freedom to choose, connect to, and build with the best technology available for your organizations. The agility and flexibility of your businesses depend on it; both today, in unprecedented times, and in the future as they become more dynamic and distributed.

You know us best for our customer and workforce products, but we’re building a true platform, which means there is a very important layer below our products. In an operating system, this would be services for memory, display and networks. In your infrastructure, the platform layer would be services for compute, storage and databases. For the Okta Identity Cloud, there are six platform services and they perform key common functions across all of our products. Today, I’m excited to announce Okta Platform Services — foundational, service-oriented technologies which truly revolutionize the Okta Identity Cloud.

The Okta Platform Services include three services that you already use and know: Okta Directories, Okta Integrations and Okta Insights. Last year, we announced the Okta Identity Engine, exposing the core set of building blocks in the Okta Identity Cloud to you as reusable, customizable components. All the features we announced last year were about customer identity. This year, we’ve greatly expanded the Okta Identity Engine Platform Service to broadly service our customer identity and workforce identity products, bringing you brand new features like App-level Policies, Flexible Account Recovery, and new integrations built around Okta Hooks.

One of the key components of a platform is that it's programmable. Imagine the possibilities if you could write a program around any internal Okta event, to automate any business process you have. Today, we’re launching Okta Workflows, a brand new Platform Service that makes the Okta Identity Cloud programmable. With Workflows, we can turn every person into a code builder—even if you’re not a developer, you can visually and graphically define workflows.

The first product we infused with Okta Workflows is Okta Advanced Lifecycle Management. The new feature, Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows, will enable our customers to not only automate joiner, mover, and leaver processes, but also provides more flexibility. This allows for more granular element creation, process timing that delivers deeper onboarding and flexible offboarding, and the ability to resolve identity conflicts.

To deliver amazing user experiences, identity can’t be tied to a single app, device or platform. You need your identity to follow you from your phone, to laptop, to apps and websites. What if you could use FaceID or Windows Hello to get into every app or website you wanted? That’s why today, we’re centralizing identity through a new Platform Service: Okta Devices. Okta Devices ensures that access and identity across all devices is secure, seamless, and consistent across platforms.

To achieve this service, we’re embedding Okta on every device. For iOS and Android, we’re including these new capabilities into the Okta Verify app, so existing users will seamlessly get this new functionality. And for Mac and Windows, we’re releasing a new Okta Verify app that will run as a background service that can be easily installed by any endpoint configuration management solution.

Okta Devices opens the door for an entirely new way to assess risk and drive better security outcomes by enabling standardized integration capabilities with endpoint protection and management technologies. Today, we announced new partnerships with VMWare Carbon Black, Tanium, and Crowdstrike, bringing together the power of fine-grain policy controls and rich device context to determine overall device security posture. Okta Devices’ integration capabilities will be used to expand the roster of supported endpoint protection and management vendors in the future, enabling all of you to become even more secure.

Okta’s Platform Services are designed to be broadly accessible within our products, and they can also be combined to create new functionality. For example, today, we’re introducing Okta FastPass to give users a truly passwordless experience. This first fully cross-platform passwordless experience is made possible by combining three platform services: Okta Devices, Okta Directories, and Okta Identity Engine. With FastPass, users can access their applications across any device, application, and operating system using factors based on who someone is like biometrics, without ever needing to enter a password. The true mark of innovation is taking something incredibly complex and making it appear simple, and that’s just what FastPass does.

There’s no doubt that this Oktane is distinct from any other one we’ve had the pleasure of hosting. While we’re excited to share all of the things we’ve built for you today, as COVID-19 continues to spread, we are continuously navigating how to best respond to and support those in need. We want to ensure every organization can maintain business continuity, data security, and productivity, so we are offering Okta’s core services for free to all new customers through Okta’s Emergency Remote Work Program.

Outside of our product offerings, Okta for Good is committing $500,000 to COVID-19 relief efforts, including rapid response in our local communities and through donation matching for the Oktane20 Live giving campaign. My wife Roxanne and I are personally committing $500,000 and will match donations dollar-for-dollar to the giving campaign here. And you can read more about our response here.

We are truly inspired by the way people all over the world are coming together to support those in need, and will keep you updated as we continue to do our part. As always, thanks for being a part of our community and we can’t wait to see you all next year.