Fischer Identity as a Service (IaaS) is an identity management solution from Fischer International.
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Okta
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Okta is an enterprise grade identity management service, built in the cloud. IT can manage access across any application, person or device. Whether the people are employees, partners or customers or whether the applications are in the cloud, on premises or on a mobile device, Okta helps IT become more secure and maintain compliance. The Okta service provides directory services, single sign-on, authentication, provisioning, workflow, and built in reporting. ment systems.
$2
Per User Per Month
Pricing
Fischer Identity as a Service
Okta
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Single Sign on
$2.00
Per User Per Month
Multi Factor Authentication
$3.00
Per User Per Month
Single Sign on Adaptive
$5.00
Per User Per Month
Multi Factor Authentication Adaptive
$6.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fischer IaaS
Okta
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Browse products and price points that make the most sense for your organization on the Okta website.
Microsoft and Ellucian required too many in-house skills and resources. Fischer seemed to have more of a higher-ed focus and experience; the real difference was the ability for Fischer as a Service to supplement our staff efforts.
Fischer is well suited for the use case scenarios where an institution has not previously used any identity management and needs to quickly provide services to meet regulatory or other deadlines. It also works well when you can implement in smaller batches of user accounts and grow over time. We have found it less appropriate for cases where we have needed to set up on-off temporary or special access. Fischer has worked with us on out-of-band provisioning but we had to pay for extra Fischer professional services to make that work.
It has extensive compatibility and rich feature set of integrating with a wide array of core systems and SaaS platforms. Daily I utilize Okta's user-friendly central hub to simplify access the numerous applications we utilize within my company (Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, among many others.)
Reducing the frequency (twice a month) of scheduled outages. But I believe they are making progress toward developing a more robust cloud infrastructure that will eliminate the need for such frequent downtimes.
There are some less than intuitive administration tools, which could be improved. Fisher is always willing to help us when we don't understand the proper way to configure using the tools.
I would like a streamlined way to move changes from our test environment into our production (live) environment instead of having to duplicate the effort.
I'm not sure it's really a room for improvement thing, but due to the granularity offered by Okta, sometimes it can be challenging to find exactly what you're looking for.
There was an instance in which we had issues getting SAML configured for an application. I feel this challenge was mostly user error (on our part) because we didn't realize the SAML instructions were SPECIFIC to each app integration and changed (codes) each time. We attempted to mirror the settings/configurations of an existing app (same app, but different domain). I think having a note somewhere that indicated that the instructions were unique to each integration would have saved us a bit of time. Again, I'm not sure this is really an issue with Okta though, more of a user learning curve thing.
Sometimes searching for things is a challenge (without the "Rockstar" add-in). For example, if you have a user group called "Okta_users_everyone", searching for "everyone" will not find it. You have to search for the beginning of the object name (not just any part of it). The ability to search partial or wildcard would greatly enhance search functionality.
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
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.
From my perspective, for the things that my group uses it for, Okta is very fast. It is as least as fast as the local password database methods that it replaces on our campus enterprise services. I do not believe that it slows anything down at all. In fact, not having to think too much about the login, because they all look the same, probably speeds things up somewhat.
We've had a few support cases over the years and every case has been handled by the Okta support team beautifully. We received clear answers to questions we had regarding setup and even were provided simple to follow guides on how to setup their product to use with custom applications.
It does deliver as advertised, provided you do your homework and understand the expected outcome before going live. Poor planning can turn the project into a nightmare. It can save the company a good deal of man hours and money by bringing about identity management automation, a self-service portal, and customizable email notifications for all of the identity owners and other stakeholders. For example, you can inform your HR team upon successful account creation and disablement. You can proactively reach out to users informing them about their account extirpation status, etc.
With respective to user interface and license cost, we thought The Okta Identity Cloud was better than other tools for use. Their customization of license was another reason for us to go with The Okta Identity Cloud over other tools.
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)
Fischer has had a positive impact by providing self-serve identity and password management tools that our constituents can use at their convience, not tied to our operational hours.
Fisher Identity as a Service has been a significant cost, but it is anticipated that it saves our students significant time and effort that they can better dedicate to their academic pursuits.
Negative initial reaction--as this was a new way of doing things, there was a period of confusion among our college constituent that required additional communication and instruction
