New Okta cloud tools aim to elevate identity access management (IAM)

Today’s workforce has no boundaries. Organizations are no longer stocked with full-time employees — they have a much larger ecosystem comprising a variety of contractors and partners.

Ultimately, this means that more devices, from more locations, are accessing company resources than ever before. 

“In this boundaryless world, not only do you have to secure access to these resources from outside your own network and your own organizational boundary, but you have to be able to govern access to them,” said Sagnik Nandy, President and CDO for workforce identity at Okta. 

And, traditionally, companies have often invested in disjointed tools — and then quickly and unfortunately discovered that they aren’t able to keep pace with modern business. 

“It requires too many custom integrations and handoffs, and also results in a poor user experience, which, in turn, hampers user adoption,” said Nandy. “Siloes and low-adoption rates limit visibility, and the security holes persist.”

This is the quandary that Okta aims to solve with Okta Customer Identity Cloud powered by Auth0. The company unveiled the customizable customer identity tool at its annual Oktane22 conference this week. 

The right access at the right level at the right time

Identity access management (IAM) is a framework to ensure that the right users have the access they should have (or not) to an organization’s technology resources. And, with the average cost of a data breach at an all-time high of $4.35 million, demand for (IAM) tools like Okta’s continue to increase. Fortune Business Insights puts the market on track to reach $34.52 billion in 2028, up from $13.41 billion in 2021 (a CAGR of 14.5%). 

With today’s announcement, Okta — which competes for market share with Oracle, IBM, SailPoint and Azure, among others — says it is taking IAM to a new level. 

Okta Customer Identity Cloud is aimed at a broad swath of identity needs, but Nandy particularly pointed to the many inherent risks posed by standing privileges. That is, when privileged accounts or users have standing access to critical infrastructure and resources. 

Ultimately, these create more security vulnerabilities because they extend access to users who may no longer require it, making their user credentials targeted assets for threat actors. 

“We’ve seen a ton of attacks that have their origins in these kinds of standing privileges,” said Nandy. 

By integrating IGA and PAM with IAM, IT has more power and control over access management without compromising security or user experience, he said. 

Today’s technology environment is heterogenous, so it is critical to integrate well with everything, said Nandy. However, most providers think of IGA, PAM and IAM as distinct, rather than a unified approach. This limits what devices and operating systems they can manage as part of a single platform, rather than one that spans multiple operating systems, applications, devices and user types. 

“Every digital experience starts with customer identity, whether you’re in the public sector or buying pizza,” said Eugenio Pace, president of customer identity at Okta. “Conventional wisdom tells us that you can make an application super secure, but very inconvenient to use. Or you can make it super convenient, but at the cost of security or privacy. This is a false choice.”

Rather, organizations do have the ability to improve experience, keep customers secure, “while enabling app builders to focus on what is most important: innovating for their customers,” said Pace. 

Nandy emphasized the fact that Okta is independent and neutral, making it compatible with thousands of applications, users, devices, OS’ and infrastructure providers. And, the company continues to seek out new use cases for business challenges around identity. 

“Given the rise of multi-cloud and the continued adoption of a broad and deep ecosystem of SaaS applications, identity solutions for privileged and nonprivileged users really need to span the full landscape of technology choice, or risk creating the  kinds of identity siloes that result in security holes,” said Nandy. 

Avoiding identity siloes

Okta’s identity technology spans workforce and customer identity use cases with two purpose-built clouds: Customer Identity Cloud and Workforce Identity Cloud.

Customer Identity Cloud is Auth0 technology Okta acquired in 2021, and it includes two use cases for Consumer Apps and SaaS Apps. 

The Workforce Identity Cloud provides a single control plane giving IT and security teams the ability to manage identity across enterprise resources and users, “which has become more and more challenging in a boundaryless world,” said Nandy.

The tool unifies the “three pillars of modern identity management” into a single control pane: IAM, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM). 

It includes Okta Identity Governance, which simplifies the process of requesting and granting access to resources, allowing IT teams to ensure that only the right users have access to the specific resources. It also includes Okta Privileged Access, which secures highly-privileged credentials for admin and root accounts. And, it gives admins the necessary tools to bolster security for privileged resources, monitor and record privileged access, and run detailed compliance reports for auditors, said Nandy. 

The tool provides an orchestration layer that leverages automation and provides visibility and control of enterprise identities, said Nandy, and that can pull in third party signals. 

All told, Workforce Identity Cloud integrates across the security stack and helps IT teams govern access for all use cases, said Nandy. This can help eliminate trade-offs between user experience and security, and IT and workforces can become “more agile and productive.” 

Nandy emphasized the fact that Okta is independent and neutral, making it compatible with thousands of applications, users, devices, OS’ and infrastructure providers. And, the company continues to seek out new use cases for business challenges around identity, he said.

“Given the rise of multi-cloud and the continued adoption of a broad and deep ecosystem of SaaS applications, identity solutions for privileged and non-privileged users really need to span the full landscape of technology choice, or risk creating the kinds of identity siloes that result in security holes,” said Nandy. 

Further Okta capabilities

The Okta Customer Identity Cloud for Consumer Apps helps organizations streamline registration and login across devices, stacks or platforms. Features include social login and progressive profiling and adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA). 

New capabilities being added to Consumer Apps by the end of Q2 2023 include the following:

● Passkeys support: App builders can turn on passkeys using a toggle in our dashboard, without touching their code.

● Highly Regulated Identity: This new toolset that allows customers to safeguard riskier transactions with extra security and policy control.

● Security Center: This leverages Okta’s threat insights from billions of authentications to create a “single pane of glass” for security teams to monitor in real-time, detect, and respond to suspicious activity.

Meanwhile, the Okta Customer Identity Cloud for SaaS Apps helps companies get enterprise-ready, onboard new users, and manage authentication across business customers. It features Enterprise Federation, directory synchronization, delegated administration, provisioning, custom branding and security policies. New enhancements now generally available include:

● Okta Workforce Enterprise Connection: This makes it easier for SaaS app builders to offer out-of-the-box integrations to Okta Workforce Identity Cloud. It is included on all Enterprise and B2B self-service plans for no additional charge. 

● Organizations: This enables SaaS companies to manage and model identity for business customers as organizations, and configure custom, organization-based branding and policies. New support for up to two million organizations per tenant, two million members per organization, and improved search capabilities are now available.