3 Ways Okta Access Gateway Paves the Way for Digital Transformation

Flexibility is at the core of any enduring success story. Companies that want to stand out in their industries need to be able to adjust to changing landscapes and user demands. But many organisations miss market opportunities due to the size, complexity and limitations of their legacy platforms — in other words, their technical debt — and years of heavy investment in and dependency on these structures often makes an outright leap to the cloud unviable.

When your company is established in the market with existing on-prem infrastructure, a hybrid approach to IT can help bridge the gap as you transition to the cloud. To simultaneously keep ahead of a crowded field, you need identity solutions that harness the cloud’s flexibility while protecting your on-prem infrastructure — and for that, Okta Access Gateway can help.

Okta Access Gateway: bringing digital transformation to businesses

Customers want to see that you’re keeping up with the times, providing useful services and intuitive user experiences backed by strong security. What they don’t want, however, is to have a variety of accounts, login experiences and passwords as a result of a mix of apps hosted both on-prem and in the cloud.

Okta Access Gateway solves this problem, allowing you to deliver the same modern access experience to your customers, no matter where the app is located, all without requiring changes in code. Regardless of how your infrastructure is split between the cloud and the ground, it lets you embed modern authentication with ease, so even your on-prem apps can provide customers with seamless service.

Let’s say your company is deploying a new application, but your billing system is hosted on-prem. Your customers would need separate sets of credentials to access the app and billing system, and would likely have to use a different interface for each app. This doubling up creates a disjointed, painful user experience, and introduces security risks from customers using recycled or weak passwords across accounts. 

With Access Gateway, you can provide the same login experience across your cloud and on-prem systems, so customers only have to verify their identities once to use all the services they need. This setup lets you integrate more applications without fragmenting the user experience or needing to overhaul your on-prem tech.

The most successful technology modernisation projects create positive change for both your customers and your internal teams. Here are three ways that Okta Access Gateway powers digital transformation, making it easier to provide secure, intuitive customer experiences.

#1: It consolidates identity and access management

Hybrid cloud models can be challenging to secure as your company needs to consider the different vulnerabilities of on-prem and cloud apps. Both host valuable data and files, making them attractive targets for threat actors. At the same time, efforts to secure access shouldn’t sacrifice usability, which will only alienate customers.

As part of the Okta Identity Cloud, Access Gateway makes it easy for organisations to extend Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) and Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to their on-prem systems, securing all apps with the same solution. When combined with SSO, Access Gateway provides customers access to all apps, regardless of type, with just one login. This also reduces overhead from managing separate authentication and password policies across different parts of your infrastructure.

By using Access Gateway with Okta’s Adaptive MFA, you can implement security policies based on the authentication factors that best suit your customer base, with the potential to go passwordless and eliminate the risks that come from poor user password practices. On-prem systems are underserved by existing MFA offerings, but Access Gateway makes sure you can secure them all equally.

#2: It provides a cohesive policy environment

Organisations with decentralised apps and account systems typically have separate policies for coordinating password resets, account setups and other functions. The administrative stress this places on IT and developers can lead to errors that affect your customers. Inconsistent policies from one app to the next can cause confusion and frustration and customers may have an unnecessarily difficult time accessing the services they need. Not to mention that keeping multiple policies, systems and syncs up to date is expensive, especially in environments with a hybrid infrastructure.

Access Gateway lets your IT team operate with a unified access policy that cascades to all cloud and on-premise apps. By providing IT with a central policy and issue actions, they can be much more responsive to customer requests, such as password resets, and they’re able to set up clear and consistent security procedures for customers to follow with ease.

#3: It uses extra intelligence to protect customers

By using Access Gateway, you can protect your digital properties from cyber threats and attacks by tapping into Okta’s security network. Okta’s ThreatInsight uses machine learning to proactively detect threats, empowering admins to block malicious IP addresses, audit ambiguous IPs and shut down account takeover attempts. With this support, Access Gateway makes your organisation more effective at protecting customer data and accounts, giving customers a secure experience they can trust.

To learn more about how OAG can support customer-friendly modernisation, explore the following resources:

• The State of Identity and Access Management in Hybrid IT (Report)
• 6 On-Prem Security Myths Debunked (Whitepaper)
• Okta Access Gateway for Customer Identity (Product)