Okta helps Edmunds get more out of its cloud apps
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Phil Potloff: In order to keep up with a rapidly growing list of services and technologies that our employees need to do their work, our internal IT team has shifted from a systems focus to a service focus, and as part of that, there's been a proliferation of cloud-based applications that have come into Edmunds in recent months.
We chose Okta because we had an explosion of cloud-based applications in our environment and really no effective ability to manage user accounts and service requests related to those new applications.
Our employees can work from any location and with so many cloud-based applications that they use in their daily work, trying to remember all their passwords, going to their key chain and their password files to try and figure out which application has which password, Okta has really made their job much simpler.
When we were looking at single sign-on vendors, there really wasn't anyone else like Okta that offered a pure cloud-based solution and that really understood how companies were using the cloud in today's world.
When you have dozens of cloud applications and dozens more on-premises custom-built tools, keeping those together in usable way for your employees is pretty difficult task to manage. Okta provides a simple way for our IT team to keep all of those services together for our employees.
Adding new applications is the Achilles heel of any single sign-on or identity management implementation. Okta already has thousands of applications already built into their network. When you ask them about adding new applications to their portfolio, their response isn't the typical "that's on our roadmap for Q2 of next year." Instead, it's "Yeah, we can manage that in the few weeks" or "we have a lot of good options to get that running very quickly."
Okta's claim was ease of implementation and their service, and to put that to the test we assigned the implementation to one of our college interns. They were able to get it up and running within a few days, without any help by the more senior staff. The other day I was walking by our Edmunds IT “pitstop”, which is a genius bar-like service we offer, and someone who was being trained on the Okta service yelled out to me and said, “Hey Phil! I love Okta. It’s so cool.”
When you have dozens of cloud applications and dozens more on-premises custom-built tools, bridging those two worlds together for our employees in one seamless view really makes IT’s job easier. One of the benefits working with Okta is that they just don't serve cloud businesses, they actually live in the cloud themselves, so we don't have to explain to them how the cloud works and how it's changing and what kind of products they need to offer in response to that.
Okta pushes as hard to make your implementation successful as they did to win our business. Implementing Okta has actually been an interesting experience because it changes how you work, and some of our applications have actually seen higher utilization as a result of Okta in our environment.
Edmunds had an explosion of cloud-based apps in their environment, but had no way to manage accounts and requests, especially with their employees working remotely. When they were looking for a single sign-on solution, no one else offered a cloud-based solution like Okta did. Not only are there already thousands apps in its application network, but adding a new one never takes too long. Edmunds loves that they don’t just serve cloud businesses; they live in the cloud themselves. Now, some of their apps have seen better usage as a result of Okta’s services.