Mobility Management Extends to Android for Work and OS X ; Provisioning Features Automate Complete User Lifecycle Across All Applications and Devices
Las Vegas, NV — November 3, 2015 — Oktane15 — At Oktane15, Okta’s third annual customer conference, CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon unveiled new mobility management features that extend Okta to a new set of devices and applications, as well as industry-leading provisioning capabilities. Okta Mobility Management now offers new enterprise-class features and support for Android for Work, PCs and OS X. Provisioning advancements include intelligent rules, collaborative workflow, compliance reporting and a platform SDK that enables deep integration with any application. These enhanced offerings simplify the way people connect to business technology, while increasing IT efficiencies and enforcing strong security policies across organizations.
“With today’s identity and mobility announcements, we are extending the breadth and depth of application integrations and introducing the intelligence and workflow necessary to automate across the entire user lifecycle. In addition, Okta Mobility Management is ready for any enterprise and now delivers even more value beyond traditional mobile devices to OS X,” said Eric Berg, Okta’s chief product officer. “These innovations empower rapid and secure adoption across enterprises, faster time to market for apps and products and improved developer productivity. As a result, enterprises and ISVs can fulfill their missions more quickly and securely.”
More Apps, More Devices, Better User Experience
Okta today announced updates to its enterprise mobility management offering, Okta Mobility Management. The enhancements create a consistent, secure user experience across all devices, as well as simplify administration of security and configuration policies for IT. Updates include:
Support for Android for Work enables companies to confidently deploy and manage all Android device models. Okta now allows IT to provision an encrypted, dedicated profile to manage Android devices, separating and securing business applications and data while keeping personal information private. Okta manages corporate applications, data and VPN policies for heightened security.
Device management for PCs and OS X can now be handled by IT departments. With Okta Mobility Management, IT can create a consistent experience for OS X users while also providing IT with end-to-end control and a single security policy across all devices and operating systems.
Private app store deployment with custom mobile application sets for users is now available through Okta Mobility Management and the Okta Application Network. IT can automatically install required applications, allowing users to select additional apps from a private, enterprise-specific catalog.
Managed application configurations take the technical burden off users to simplify workflows and create a consistent experience across all devices. Now IT can preconfigure mobile applications for end users with key value pairs. For example, IT can automatically send usernames and passwords to applications so the user does not need to type it manually or, alternatively, IT can disable “copy and paste” for username and password fields on selected applications.
iOS Safari extension enables users to log in to accounts on mobile Safari browsers with a single tap via Okta. Now, when a user receives a Salesforce.com or Workday link, for example, he or she will be able to log in to the application by simply clicking the Okta icon located in the credential input field.
“Trunk Club employees are incredibly mobile and we want to enable them to work efficiently from any device, anywhere. We’ve depended on Okta for identity management for over a year, so choosing Okta Mobility Management to manage our employees’ iOS and Android devices was a no brainer. Now, using Okta Verify and Okta Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication, we’ve made it easier and more secure for off-network employees to log in by asking for approval with a simple click,” said Rick Pollak, Trunk Club’s director of IT. “We’re excited to push our internally-developed apps to our employees’ mobile devices and our warehouse. Okta’s updates will help our people work even more efficiently and securely without sacrifice.”
Deeper Integrations, Flexible Rules Engine, Collaborative Workflow
Okta also introduced enhancements to further simplify provisioning and deprovisioning for IT professionals and developers, increase visibility into application access, and improve compliance. Updates include:
Okta Cloud Provisioning SDK now supports custom provisioning integrations in the cloud. Customers can build custom integrations that are 100-percent cloud-based and ISVs can add their own integrations to the Okta Application Network. This allows any application to benefit from Okta’s provisioning features, including user import and provisioning, deprovisioning, as well as user data and password synchronization. Okta already enables customers such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Informatica to build Cloud Provisioning Connectors with Pathgather, EventBoard and SmartRecruiters, respectively. Other ISVs working on provisioning integrations with Okta include Slack, ClearSlide, Envoy and Zoom.
Compliance reporting through Okta’s deep application integrations enable IT professionals to view the configurations within applications, compare them to their IT system of record in Okta and adjust appropriate levels of access for each user or group of users.
A flexible rules engine allows new membership rules making it easier for IT to automatically assign users to groups based on existing group membership or attributes. Building on Okta’s Universal Directory, these new capabilities allow customers to define group membership rules using a wizard or custom scripts for maximum flexibility. IT professionals can now also write back attributes into applications like Workday.
Collaborative workflow capabilities enable users to request access to applications directly from managers or application owners within Okta, reducing helpdesk workload, empowering the business to work smarter and accelerating user onboarding. Now if a team member requires access to an application like Slack, his or her supervisor can grant access without placing a helpdesk ticket. Okta is the first cloud-based identity service to offer this capability.
“The SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Platform unlocks the recruiting power of every employee at a company, often at some of the world’s largest companies. So when our customer, Informatica, asked us to work with Okta to build a provisioning integration to the Okta Application Network, we jumped at the opportunity to make our platform even more accessible and secure,” said Brett Queener, SmartRecruiters’ president and COO. “With Okta’s Cloud Provisioning SDK, we built an integration in under two weeks. Now our customers benefit from Okta’s various provisioning features, making it even easier for them to deploy SmartRecruiters and achieve hiring success.”
For more information, please visit: https://www.okta.com/products/#product-it.
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