Led by CEO Tod McKinnon — the vice president of engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009 — Okta is moving into the on-demand identity and access-management space. The goal is to accelerate enterprise adoption of cloud and web-based apps.
Okta is trying to address a pain point in the rise of software as a service. SaaS has made it easy for companies to adopt business-critical applications, but has also introduced a new set of challenges for both IT and end users. Okta promises to centrally secure and control access to applications, provide end users single sign-on for all web apps, and give businesses insights to maximize ROI while minimizing risk.
“Enterprises everywhere are realizing the inherent benefits of running their core IT services in the cloud,” McKinnon said. “But this shift fundamentally requires them to rethink their IT infrastructure and how their employees access it. Okta is the only enterprise-class, on-demand service purpose built to help customers secure and manage their entire cloud-services network and the people who need access to it, with no professional services required.”
Reducing Costs, Improving Security
With Okta, IT can integrate cloud applications with existing directory services, controlling access across applications, provisioning and de-provisioning employees, and analyzing usage across all applications. For end users, Okta provides single sign-on across all applications. Analysts and enterprises are both bullish on the concept.
“As businesses shift more critical applications to the cloud, they are challenged to maintain the same degree of control that they have with their on-premise applications,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president at Gartner. “Cloud-services brokers focusing on identity and access management who can secure and integrate multiple cloud services will facilitate more secure, cross-enterprise adoption of cloud-based services — and that will convince a lot of enterprises to buy.”
Early Okta customers include Pandora, LiveOps, Enterasys, FusionStorm and AMAG…