REA Group Limited

Damian Fasciani:  My name is Damian Fasciani. I work for REA Group and I'm the Enterprise Technology Services Manager. We are the leading property portal or digital online business. We've been around for 20 years.

We started our cloud journey in 2011. We saw the need to probably simplify the technology experience for people. We wanted to promote mobility. We wanted to break down the barriers with how people could utilise technology and kind of move away from traditional things like VPN or telling people they had to be in the office to access systems.

We wanted a simplified user experience that would stop people from forgetting usernames and passwords. Coming to our version of a genius bar and always asking about how can I reset my password. I forgot what the URL was for Webmile and so forth. Those things shouldn't happen. We've rolled it out internationally. We have around about 1,100 staff internationally that use Okta to access all our enterprise Cloud base systems.

From a security perspective REA is SOX compliant. We have a lot of focus on how we manage user access to our cloud base systems. Okta's become part of our due diligence process on SaaS space vendors now. So if we're fulfilling a particular use case in the company and we look to new technology with a lot of business for a functional team in REA, if there's no compatibility, we thought Okta, we don't invest in those technologies. Okta is one of our must have requirements.

All the way to now, we're working with our people and culture team to automate user provisioning integration potentially with Workday if we invest in that as a Cloud base HR system.

So Okta has become the centre of user access management mobility. Rather than us promoting Okta now within the organisation, we have parts of the business coming to us saying, "We're thinking about using this technology. How do we put it into Okta?"

It was still a shock in parts of the business when Okta was implemented. It was a shock in a good sense of the word that people were surprised that internal IT could deliver such a robust product and a user-friendly product. It helped us with adoption. It kick started our relationship with the business from a consulting perspective when we reorganised our enterprise IT teams. It kind of brought us closer to people and I think it humanises technology as well. Particularly when you've got a lot of tech and people don't know what to use. When you use Okta to give them access to the systems that they only need ... When the simplicity with technology, people will gravitate toward it.

You can implement the best tech at REA, but if it's not simple, people won't gravitate to it. I think Okta does that really well.

Okta has been part of a selection of a small group of vendors that have been really easy to deal with. We're trying to build a simple efficient and stress free property experience. It's funny because we get the same Okta. We get a simple, efficient, and stress free engagement from Okta. We're very happy with the relationship that we've got.