Okta Identity Platform: Our Vision of Interoperability
Oktane22 is bringing substantial innovation across Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud with new capabilities and deeper functionality across both of our core use cases.
As Okta invests in both of its cloud offerings and develops purpose-built functionality for app building, IT, and security teams, it’s critical that we also invest in connecting our clouds. This interoperability and connection between our two clouds not only has the ability to create greater value for customers in flexibility and security, but it can become the catalyst for rapid innovation that drives business outcomes. The home of this interoperability is the Okta Identity Platform, where shared platform services and the Okta Integration Network reside.
Many of the Oktane22 announcements have focused on near-term customer benefits and outcomes associated with products and features used by customers today. At the same time, many future innovations around the Okta Identity Platform will take shape gradually.
As the Okta Identity Platform evolves, additional services will be available for customers, emphasizing capabilities that unlock more use cases. With the potential to solve new and evolving business challenges, these shared services offer the same ease of use and comprehensiveness that Okta technology has come to represent.
We begin with two key areas:
Okta Workflows
Today, Okta Workflows makes it easy to automate identity processes at scale on Workforce Identity Cloud—without writing code. To innovate with Okta, customers can use if-this-then-that logic, Okta's pre-built connector library, and the ability to connect to any publicly available API. Customer challenges like joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle management processes, as well as recently announced security response orchestrations, can be quickly automated and scaled through Workflows’ powerful drag-and-drop user interface. Workflows can enhance customer identity use cases by adding extensibility and automation beyond the authentication decision.
In the future, Customer Identity Cloud customers will be able to leverage Workflows to build automations tied to events within Customer Identity cloud, kicking off downstream actions like email campaigns or security incident response activities.
Risk Signals
Billions of authentication attempts occur across Okta’s workforce and identity clouds each month, with a consistent flow of attempts occurring across the globe. Each of these authentication attempts, and their corresponding risk signals, provide a mapping of the identity risk landscape. They can inform access decisions and enhance security postures across the customer bases of each cloud. Aggregating risk signals across Workforce and Customer Identity Cloud will deliver greater customer impact through tools like the recently introduced Security Center and Workforce Identity Cloud’s ThreatInsight.
The potential of the Okta Integration Network
The Okta Integration Network (OIN) has long served as the de facto meeting place for SaaS app identity integrations and enterprise workforces. In its earliest days, the OIN featured proprietary SSO integrations like Secure Web Authentication. It eventually became the go-to place for standards-based protocols for SSO and provisioning like SAML, OIDC, and SCIM. Okta’s vision for the OIN focuses on its ability to extend that foundational role and grow into an epicenter for more SaaS innovation and growth for enterprises and SaaS builders alike.
For SaaS app builders and enterprise workforces using Workforce Identity Cloud, the OIN is a natural bridge. And as more SaaS apps leverage Customer Identity Cloud to build enterprise-ready identity capabilities, more workforce customers will integrate into those apps through the OIN. This provides workforce customers access to the latest applications their employees need while allowing SaaS builders an easy way to sell to enterprise customers creating a symbiotic marketplace.
With thousands of enterprise-ready apps adopted daily by tens of thousands of enterprises, the OIN will have a massive influx of data-led insights. This data will provide increased OIN insights, allowing workforce customers to surface usage and adoption insights in addition to analyses like Businesses at Work available today. It will also be the foundation for SaaS app builders to create better, more innovative apps to serve customer needs. The benefits provided by the OIN marketplace will, in turn, create a network effect that further enables workforce customers and SaaS builders.
This future of choice through the OIN will deliver enterprises better security outcomes without curbing IT performance or workforce agility. Enterprises can continue to choose whatever SaaS solutions work best for their needs without having to compromise on security, usability, or productivity. With OIN, SaaS devs building on Customer Identity Cloud will have a clear blueprint of what enterprise readiness looks like, as well as the ability to implement those capabilities quickly, distinguishing their positions in the OIN.
Taking steps towards the future of the Okta Identity Platform
Today at Oktane22, we announced three key steps we’re taking in the near term to drive the powerful network effects the OIN can offer:
Product Enhancements
The Okta Enterprise Connection, found within our SaaS Apps product, will be included on all enterprise and B2B self-service plans for no additional charge. Now, anyone who needs to federate to the Workforce Identity Cloud can easily do so right out of the box—and at no additional cost, with Okta.
Education
Okta is releasing The Enterprise Identity Benchmark, providing SaaS app builders with a blueprint for meeting enterprise security and identity expectations.
Auth0 for Startups
The Auth0 for Startups Program is evolving to offer free Customer Identity Cloud technology for companies with up to $5M in funding. This provides these SaaS apps with an enterprise-level product that helps get their applications quickly up and running.
Okta’s worldview enables choice and innovation. As the Workforce and Customer Identity Cloud continue to evolve to meet the specific needs of our two broad use cases, the Okta Identity Platform offers both customers, and the industry as a whole, a future of greater interoperability and opportunity.
