Announces Industry's First Enterprise Identity Network and Major Service Update with Expanded Capabilities for Cloud, Mobile and On-Premises Environments
San Francisco, CA – December 04, 2012 — Okta today unveiled its vision for an industry-first Enterprise Identity Network. The company also announced a broad set of new functionality for cloud, mobile and on-premises environments to allow enterprises to manage seamless, secure access across any person, application or device.
"The rapid adoption of mobile devices and cloud services, together with a multitude of new partnerships and customer-facing applications, has extended the identity boundary of today's enterprise," states the September 2012 Forrester Research, Inc. report, "Evolve Your Identity Strategy For The Extended Enterprise." "Legacy approaches to IAM are failing us because they can't manage access from consumer endpoints, they don't support rapid adoption of cloud services, and they can't provide secure data exchange across user populations. Forrester Research, Inc., Principal Analyst Eve Maler noted, in her September 2012 blog post entitled "Cloud-Native Identity Management is Suddenly Looking Like a Winner," that "credible, comprehensive cloud-native IAM will put serious pressure on the classic on-premises suites, increasing choice for enterprises."
Okta's cloud-native identity service is used today by hundreds of enterprises including Activision, Allergan, BMC Software, Groupon, Informatica, LinkedIn, Purolator and SAP, which have realized that their identity challenges can only be solved with a service that runs in the cloud, integrates with their on-premises environments and covers all their applications, people and devices. These hundreds of enterprises, the thousands of cloud application vendors in the Okta Application Network and millions of people using Okta's service today form the foundation for the industry's first Enterprise Identity Network.
Okta's Enterprise Identity Network comprises:
- A Network of Organizations that manage secure access across all people, applications and devices and seamlessly federate with partners, customers and vendors.
- A Network of People, each with a unique identity within Okta that provides seamless access to applications that they use as an employee, a partner, a supplier or customer.
- A Network of Applications that provide enterprises with access to thousands of cloud, web and mobile applications, as well as application vendors with access to hundreds of enterprises and millions of people.
It is founded on five key tenets that are core to any modern identity management solution:
- Delivered as a Cloud Service: Okta is delivered as a true cloud service. No expensive hardware and software to install or maintain, no integrations to manage, and a service that is always up to date and future-proof.
- Enterprise-Grade: Okta governs access to critical business applications and manages its customers' user identities. The company has invested heavily to build and operate a secure, highly reliable service that is extensively audited by third parties and able to scale to meet the demands of the largest enterprises.
- Integrate Everywhere: Okta is about connecting, and must connect users (employees, partner, customer) to all applications (cloud, web or mobile) from any device (PC, smartphone, tablet) and integrate with existing on-premises directories and identity management systems
- Vendor Neutral: Okta is a neutral platform that gives organizations the freedom to choose which services and vendors they use with the confidence that Okta will support them and does not have an application agenda of its own.
- Focused on Delivering Enterprise Identity: Okta is focused exclusively on delivering identity services for enterprises and making its customers wildly successful. Okta makes a customer's identity problems their problems, and solves them.
"We've relied on a hybrid approach in scaling our business – so integrating 20 plus cloud applications with Active Directory and managing secure access across all locations, devices and employees have been critical to our success," said Mark Settle, CIO, BMC Software. "Between its zero downtime architecture, neutral standing with thousands of pre-integrated applications and relentless focus on our success – and now the introduction of Enterprise Identity Network – Okta is essential to how work gets done at BMC."
"With our Enterprise Identity Network, we're ushering in a new era of identity that's delivered from the cloud and solves the economic and technological limitations of legacy identity systems that can't contend with the modern enterprise," said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta. "Identity is central to how work gets done in a business environment that's more complex than ever, and we've developed a future-proof, people-centric service to meet those demands. For the first time, employees are able to connect with all the applications and people necessary so they can focus on work, not on navigating IT."
Okta Releases Major Service Updates
Okta's newest features deliver flexible and highly secure access to both, cloud, mobile and on-premises applications, as well as extend its core identity platform. Features include:
Microsoft Office 365 Support: The industry's most comprehensive, Microsoft-certified support for single sign-on and user management for this critical cloud application.
Okta Mobile Application: A native Okta iOS application for iPads and iPhones.
Expanded Directory and Custom Application Integration: LDAP Integration for vendors such as Sun/Oracle, Open LDAP and Open DJ, as well as authoring tools and authentication plug-ins for leading web application platforms.
Expanded MFA Capability: New SMS-based, two-factor authentication through Okta's native multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution and support for Verisign VIP.
Flexible Policy Framework: A simple, yet powerful framework to manage access policies to applications by factors such as time of day or location.
Robust Set of Platform APIs: Access to a new collection of REST APIs across a broad range of authentication, password, user and group management functionality.
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