Former Salesforce.com Execs Launch New On-Demand Service to Accelerate Secure Adoption of Cloud Apps

SAN FRANCISCO – January 27, 2011 – Okta today unveiled a new on-demand identity and access management service that helps enterprises accelerate the adoption of their cloud and web-based applications. Okta empowers IT to centrally secure and control access to applications, provides end users single sign-on for all of their web apps, and gives the business the insight it needs to maximize ROI while minimizing risk.

The rise of Software as a Service has made it easy for companies to adopt a wide variety of business critical applications but has also introduced a new set of challenges for both IT and end users. With Okta, IT can address the security and management challenges by integrating cloud applications with existing directory services, controlling access across applications, quickly provisioning and de-provisioning employees, and centrally analyzing usage across all applications. For end users, Okta provides single sign-on across all of their applications, eliminating password fatigue and improving their productivity.

“As businesses shift more critical applications to the cloud, they are challenged to maintain the same degree of control that they have with their on-premise applications,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow. “Cloud services brokers focusing on identify and access management who can secure, and integrate multiple cloud services will facilitate more secure, cross enterprise adoption of cloud based services – and that will convince a lot of enterprises to buy.”

Early Okta customers include Pandora, LiveOps, Enterasys, Fu