Okta saved us a lot of time and confusion

Okta is the primary cloud IdP for the campus. Several years ago we started a project to move all services and servers over to a more secure authentication and authorization system than local password databases within each application. Also, our Information Security department wanted to enforce uniform password criteria across the campus such that passwords would meet minimum criteria for best practices.

This has allowed us to reduce the familiarization period for students, staff, and faculty greatly. By only having one identity provider that is the same across all services, we only have to train them on one way to log in, and if they are having trouble for some reason, the Service Desk only has one system to need to troubleshoot or have a run book to lead them through to resolve their issue.

I haven't had any experience with their Professional Services or Education Services group, but I have had a couple of very good interactions with their Customer Success function when we were updating our macOS MDM system (Jamf Pro) to Okta authentication. As one of the engineers for that product, I was fairly nervous about downtime during the changeover. However, they made it very clear what was happening and what needed to be done, and working with them and our own local Identity and Access Management group made the whole process less stressful. The new access system works great, and is easy to use, and no longer is unique just to Jamf Pro.

We always strive to have minimum downtime for any reason on our campus/enterprise systems. Generally, if one of our systems were to go down, it would not be strictly due to the internal authentication, but if there were an access problem due to an end user having a problem with their password or level of access, it is very good to have a very reliable central one-stop shop for analyzing and correcting the problem.