Okta - Managing your users in an increasingly diverse cloud.
Overall Satisfaction with Okta
We use Okta to manage any users at one one of our schools that has a Google Apps account. This typically means that they are full-time, or at least need to access multiple systems and would benefit from, not only the single-sign on integration with Google, but also the ability to have SSO or passwords saved for other web apps and systems.
Pros
- My focus is on training, support, and end user experience, and this is where I feel Okta is a no-brainer. If your organization has multiple systems to access (email, productivity apps, marketing/social apps, business apps, intranet bookmarks...), then you need Okta to keep them all one click away.
- We all have systems that we don't access on a daily basis. Expecting users to remember the passwords to these systems, or to remember that they exist at all, can be a tall order. Okta remembers those passwords for the user, so they just need to click, and then get to work.
- Adding new staff and terminating staff can be a drag on IT and Help Desk who need to ensure that accounts are closed across multiple systems. Okta makes this easy for you. Deactivate in Okta, and the rest is done for you (or is easily shown that it needs to be done in some instances). This ensures that the wrong people don't continue to access system and resources they shouldn't.
- They treat you like a partner. Even though you may not be a massive company (maybe you are, in which case, goof for you), but it doesn't matter. Okta will treat you like you're their most important customer. They've been excellent with support, and just being available for us in general.
Cons
- Okta works best with apps that support single-sign on. This, while is a quickly growing list, is still not the norm. Okta is taking many steps to change this, but the current reality is that many of the most popular (particularly consumer) platforms don't support this.
- If we know all of our users are going to Okta first, I'd love to be able to communicate with them there (important announcements, upcoming maintenance, known outages, etc.). This is a feature I've been told is coming, but isn't available today.
- We've definitely seen an increase in employee efficiency. No more do they need to know "what systems do I need to know about" or "how do I login," or even worse, "what's my username/password," they just log into Okta, see their systems, and click.
- Customer service has vastly improved. Gone are the days of emailing login URLs, dealing with bookmark links that go stale and out of date, and resetting passwords for end users. Your Help Desk staff will love you.
- We definitely see an increase in user adoption of new platforms. Because the app icon is on their Okta dashboard, it's a constant reminder that it exists, and encourages them to click on it to check it out.
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