5 Ways to Distinguish Best-of-Breed Identity

All IT and security teams want to help their businesses grow, but you can only do that when you’re able to truly focus on innovation and differentiation. While it’s frustrating to be unexpectedly sidelined by complex identity challenges, the identity and access management (IAM) layer of your environment can’t be ignored. That’s because identity is a critical gateway to everyone and everything in your organization. Managing IAM is especially difficult if you’re working within the stifling limitations of identity software that contains decades of technical debt. Many popular platforms still rely on legacy architecture that creates a massive attack surface, limits high availability, and hinders your application choices and future growth in general.

5 critical questions to ask your identity provider

As the go-to modern identity partner, Okta is committed to helping customers navigate their most complex and difficult use cases. Based on our exclusive focus on identity and our extensive experience supporting global enterprises, we’ve noted key questions that forward-looking technology teams ask to evaluate whether their IAM provider can effectively meet the organization’s evolving needs.

Do you put customer trust and security first?

First of all, you’ll want to consider how much research and development your vendor invests in critical platform capabilities that build customer trust. And since one of the most critical aspects of IAM security is multi-factor authentication (MFA), it’s jaw-dropping that the global percentage of admins who actually use MFA today is just 9%. Given this, it’s crucial to find out how robust your provider’s MFA offering is.

Important questions to ask

  • Do you prioritize integrations to your own internal stack of security tools or offer mature integrations with advanced tools (Proofpoint, Netskope, and Crowdstrike)?
  • How many security exposures or vulnerabilities has your environment experienced in the past 12-24 months?
  • How many “9s” of availability do you offer? How much on-prem legacy does your solution rely upon?
  • What scalability measures do you have in place? Do you use automation to dynamically add, heal, or remove servers on demand?
  • Does your solution officially support the full spectrum of MFA factor choices today? Or are many of the factors still in preview?
  • How do you mana