Resilience redefined: Strengthening Identity availability

In the dynamic landscape of digital Identity management, organizations demand robust solutions that provide a seamless experience and continuity in the face of unforeseen disruptions. At Okta, we pride ourselves on providing “always-on” Identity services for millions of workers and consumers and offer a transparent view of the continuous strides we’re making. We understand our customers’ need for heightened availability, and we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability of the Enhanced Disaster Recovery add-on, showcasing our commitment to delivering an even more resilient Okta.

Overview

Okta provides all customers with Standard Disaster Recovery across two regions. Each region contains an active-active-active deployment across three availability zones. When a primary region fails (all availability zones within that region fail), a failover to the disaster recovery region occurs. We include Standard Disaster Recovery out of the box for all customers. Standard Disaster Recovery will fail over all customers within a cell to read-only access from the primary region to the disaster recovery region within one hour. For organizations seeking expedited failover times in the event a primary region is to fail, our Enhanced Disaster Recovery is the solution. This add-on reduces the read-only access failover time from one hour to under five minutes — a guarantee activated the moment Okta determines the failover will effectively address a regional service outage, ensuring swift and reliable remediation. Additionally, with Enhanced Disaster Recovery, customers can also request specific production tenants be failed over to the disaster recovery region. 

Similar to Standard Disaster Recovery, once failed over, customers gain read-only access to core Okta services, and all existing users can authenticate to applications as needed, regardless of their prior auth state or device. Full read-write access is restored within 24 hours, allowing configuration changes such as modifying users or policies. 

Availability and additional resources

Currently, Enhanced Disaster Recovery is available in North American commercial cells, with plans to expand globally and into our compliance cells (including FedRAMP and HIPAA) in 2025.

To learn more about this capability, contact your account team and check out the following resources!

• Overview of Enhanced Disaster Recovery
• Frequently Asked Questions

Okta’s forward-looking statement applies to this article.