Set Your Workers Free: How the Cloud’s Transforming User Productivity

The way we work at home is changing.

Back in the day (way back), a typical work day would look something like this: You’d come in to the office, fire up your desktop computer, go get some coffee while you waited the 5 minutes it took for your machine to boot up, sign on to your network, launch some software running on the company’s network, do some work, read a newspaper while you eat your sack lunch in the break room, do some more work, log off, power down your desktop computer (those things used a lot of energy!) then go home and watch the Cosby show.

They don't make sweaters like that any more. I hope.

If you brought work home with you it was a stack of papers, or maybe some floppy disks with files you could work on via a home computer (for you kids out there, this is a floppy disk). If you needed access to that software on your company network, um, well, you got back in your car and headed in to the office. Good times.

Early Days: Dial-up at Home and Laptops

Enter home dial-up networking; now, if you have a home computer you can dial in to your company’s network and maybe access some of your files. The sound of the modem screeching (yikes!) was a worthwhile price to pay to be able to do some work or check your email after hours. But you’re not getting much work done; all of the server-based software programs are probably not working well over a 28kbps modem. (Yes, that’s a "k," you can look it up.) But that’s all right because you’ve got a couple Friends episodes on VHS to catch up on.

I'll be there for you

Enter the ubiquitous laptop and the early stages of broadband. When you went home you could take most of your work with you, right on your laptop. You would fire up Word and Excel, and you could VPN into work to get access to files and on-premises applications. You could get even some work done while you watched The Office. Don’t lose your VPN token the night before the big presentation though!

Dwight would lose his token

iPads, the Cloud and the Need for Management

It’s amazing how fast things change. Today, when you work at home you reach for the living room laptop to check your email. You move to the computer in your home office after dinner to update the forecast in your CRM tool. And you grab the iPad next to the bed to do some last minute work before bed. All of your software is in the cloud, so you should be able to access it from any device.

But there’s a growing issue: Every cloud app has a different username and password you need to remember. Does this password have the capital letter and # sign, or is this the one that needs eight characters? How many times have you tried to log in to finish up your expense report, couldn’t remember your password, tried a couple of guesses and then got locked out or simply gave up? And how many cloud applications are you using? It’s not easy to remember all the different apps you’re using. Have you looked at your bookmarks folder lately?

all your password are belong to us

Okta: Set Your Workers Free

Okta changes all of that. We solve the username password issue with single-sign on to *all* of your cloud and on-premises web applications. And we make it easy to find and launch your apps with our end user home page — from any device, anywhere, at any time.

Okta on all your devices

Our customers have noticed the difference, too.

“Last year, at our national sales meeting, when I told our employees they would no longer have to remember all of the different usernames and passwords for their apps, they clapped and cheered for 10 minutes,” said Ken Stineman at Genomic Health.

“At the end of the day, it’s about user productivity; that’s our job, to enable our workforce," said Jerry Yu at Jazz Pharmaceuticals. “Let’s say you have someone working on a mobile device — it’s much harder to enter passwords on a small screen. Okta is going to be the core infrastructure that will allow us to access our resources on any device, anywhere, at any time.”

The cloud’s making tremendous headway into the enterprise, and our customers are experiencing the cost-saving and productivity-boosting benefits that cloud apps, managed through Okta, and mobile devices can bring to their businesses. Increasingly, this is the way employees now work, and IT must not stand in the way.