Genomic Health

Ken Stineman: As a health care provider, security and access to information is very important for Genomic Health, but over the last 3 years, we've really adopted a CloudVerse strategy, where we're trying to minimize the amount of on-premise infrastructure that we have and leverage to the greatest extent possible best of breed cloud services.

Starting with human resources, those departments started with best of breed applications in the cloud. With that, our active directory standard really was no longer working, so each of these apps, a user would get their own different credential for each app. As we got to more than 20 applications, that meant when a new hire was starting at the company that they might actually have 20 different usernames and passwords.

Before Okta, a big complaint of users was having to remember all their multiple passwords and not knowing where to access all their applications. Okta really brought for us a unified dashboard where all of our users could access their applications in one place.

Okta's integration with active directory is a key feature of the product, giving users that are on-premise who would access their Windows applications the same functionality when they access their cloud-based applications. The feature of desktop SSO makes that completely seamless for a user, so they don't have to type in a username and password when accessing either an on-premise application or one of our cloud software as a service applications.

When we presented the Okta solution at our global sales meeting, it was one of the few security things that we got a standing ovation for. People were so excited to be able to access their applications more easily. More than half of the Genomic Health workforce is using Okta on a daily basis, and we're able to see that usage through reports in the Okta system. We've gotten lots of very good praise from the user community, things like, "Hallelujah, thank you for adding this product to Genomic Health."

Okta has been an excellent partner, really working with us not just to provide the services but actually helping us to do a really rapid implementation. We were able to bring the product online in just a few weeks. Over time, they've been able to provide excellent support to us. They've also been an expert provider to give us advice on SAML and other technologies, and so we've really relied on them for their expertise and partnership.

As I talk with my peers, and they discuss all the challenges of adopting cloud-based applications, they have questions about security, they have questions about how to manage all the information and number of applications, user credentials. I'd really say having a really strong cloud identity provider like Okta is really a key piece to solve a lot of the problems.