Item: Okta
Rating: 10
Author: Brian Farrell

Overall Satisfaction with Okta

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a fully cloud-based company with almost no on premise software/hardware, we use Okta to as SSO/identity management for nearly every tool we use in our business. Our corporate team, company employees and more than 600 GMs, assistant GMs, directors and instructors use Okta to sign in at over 145 franchised locations. It solves remembering passwords for our end users, creating a single portal to start their day, provisioning users automatically for our core apps and allowing us to manage diverse IT situations at 145+ locations with an IT team of 4.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use/simple and clean experience from end user to administrator
Simple and mostly-automated setup, whether it be for apps, users or settings
Constant addition of new apps, and frequent updates of apps to include SAML
Very easy-to-access support team

Cons

Their knowledge base could be more organized and pruned/updated
Sometimes it seems too simple or it's not clear that a function can't be accomplished from a page you'd think it can
More flexibility to customize, white label it without having to build an entirely new portal ourselves. Even though you can put a logo in, the portal is still very okta-themed

Return on Investment

Increased employee efficiency
Better customer service through a more easy to understand platform
One place to access all systems

Likelihood to Recommend

What apps do they support and for your core apps, are they Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) enabled to provision/deprovision users automatically? Will that support be added in the near- or long-term? We haven't implemented any integration with Active Directory, so I can't say how that goes, but it would be nice to see more universal directory features implemented in their UI (rather than relying on AD or LDAP since they say they're "universal directory"-focused)

Using Okta

Support Headcount Required

Likelihood to Renew

They've shown that they're committed to maintaining a great core product while expanding to be more all-encompassing. They've released the first version of Okta Mobility Management, which is a completely different approach to a traditional MDM-type solution. While we don't use it yet, we're looking forward to how they develop it. It's a good example of a company that's still really growing, but doing it well.

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Okta is the end all be all

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