Microsoft Azure vs. The Okta Identity Cloud

In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.

I would definitely suggest this tool to my colleagues. When it comes to single sign to integrate all our applications under one umbrella, this will be the tool to go for sure. In our company, when we were moving our applications to the cloud one by one, we wanted one tool that could serve as a platform for all the applications with one password and with enhanced multi factor authentication and we choose The Okta Identity Cloud. When it comes to SAP, integration with The Okta Identity Cloud was a little tedious.

Incentivized

• Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
• Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
• BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
• Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.

Incentivized

• RBAC is simple, straight forward and easy to manage
• Integrations of Social Login are simple to configure and the Auth0 documentation shows step by step how to configure it
• Rules/Hooks provide customization to the Auth0 flow, making it a great solution to define how we allow our users to login into our applications

Incentivized

• In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
• Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
• Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.

Incentivized

• The user interface of Okta is basic and needs improvement. There's some learning curve for new users.
• One time integration effort is high for the initial setup. Took us around 3 weeks.
• Okta times out pretty quick making us login multiple times in the day.

Incentivized

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

Okta has a passion to provide secure and scalable identity solution. Their passion has come across as advocacy in a way that has deepened my knowledge of the field of authentication. I took identity for granted before but after seeing features such as external authentication I know that Okta can enable my business to reach new heights

Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"

Incentivized

Some of its features are great and some are slightly complex and not easy without vendor support.

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

The Okta Identity Cloud advertises 4 9's of reliability and I would go as far to say that it may even do better than that. As a true Global organization that operates in just about every region of the world, we have yet to have an issue with The Okta Identity Cloud that has impacted our business operations.

Incentivized

The Okta Identity Cloud performance is very good and there is never any reports from the user community or from the IT administrative team of slow response or sluggishness. In addition, integrations with other systems does not slow them down and everything works seamlessly. The only other feedback is that once in a while there is a slight delay in receiving a second factor on a mobile device but this is likely due to a phone endpoint issue and not the The Okta Identity Cloud service.

Incentivized

Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.

Incentivized

There isn't a clear method to get a hold of support when trouble arises if you're on their standard plan. You can file a support ticket and they generally are responsive. I've often been able to find similar questions to the questions I've had when it comes to support in their ticket history, however, some have been closed without a satisfactory conclusion for the original poster.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

Okta was the most expensive choise between than, but still our best bet. This was caused because they were able to integrate with 90% of our software without any headache and 10% with some studies - this work would be higher and requires more working hours from our engineers if we opted to their competitors.

Incentivized

Being a cloud native application, The Okta Identity Cloud is extremely scalable and easy to setup. By integrating into existing directories and applications via standard techniques and protocols, it is very easy to both initially setup and add additional users as required. Once all the necessary integrations are setup, it's a simple rinse and repeat process to onboard additional users (which can be automated with imports as well)

Incentivized

• Brings down Capex to customers.
• Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
• Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.

Incentivized

• Customer experience has been a big win for us. Extremely minimal issues reported.
• We did not have a PAM in place at all until The Okta Identity Cloud
• Relatively easy to deploy. No major downtimes to deploy was a nice bonus.