How Okta Helped School of Rock Start Rocking in the Cloud

Jack Black may not have had to worry about IT challenges in his 2003 movie “School of Rock,” but the real of School of Rock does. The music program, which encourages its students to rock on stage and in life, was founded as a single music school in Philadelphia in 1998. Almost fifteen years later, it’s now an international franchise, operating nearly 100 schools across the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil – and teaching more than 8,000 students worldwide. After such a rapid growth of users and locations in a little over a decade, earlier this year School of Rock’s IT team realized that an identity and access management solution was necessary.

Each School of Rock franchise guarantees its employees an exclusive operating territory, extensive training, and access to an IT infrastructure to efficiently manage their school’s music business. Because of this they needed a seamless, secure way to for their 500 internal users to access the company’s cloud-based applications – including Docusign, NetSuite and Google Docs – from the corporate center and when working remotely in order to successfully take students from the practice room to the stage. Okta's identity management solution made this possible.

Evan Trent, School of Rock’s vice president of digital strategy and technology, told us that his IT team looked into three IAM solutions before settling on Okta.

“We knew that Okta was an enterprise-ready platform, and that we would be able to get up and running much faster than with the two other alternatives,” Evan told us in a recent case study. “Okta also enabled us to provide the best user experience on both sides of the fence - for the end users in the field, as well as our IT admins.”

In a recent CITEWorld story, Matt Rosoff said the company is setting a new standard for the enterprise cloud. He explained how School of Rock decided not buy their solutions all from one vendor like Salesforce or Microsoft and instead chose best-of-breed solutions from a wide variety of vendors for their IT needs. “As a result, School of Rock looks like a poster child for the new-breed cloud-based services that are disrupting traditional enterprise vendors,” Rosoff wrote, “and can provide valuable lessons for other fast-growing companies looking at cloud solutions.”

We couldn’t agree more.

To read more on how School of Rock is using Okta identity management, check out the case study.