City Year: Improving Mobile Identity with Okta

We recently had the pleasure of catching up with Welles Hatch, City Year’s CIO, to learn what Okta’s doing to help this not-for-profit organization challenge the educational status quo. If you’re not familiar, City Year provides AmeriCorps corps members on teams to work as mentors, coaches and tutors in schools across the country to get kids at risk of dropping out of school back on track to graduate.

One of Okta’s major benefits, according to Welles, is increased mobility, which is critical for City Year’s service model since the company’s corps members often don’t have offices to work from within the schools.

“We’re enabling a BYOD environment,” Welles explains. “So the administrative challenges around letting anyone show up with any appliance and having a purely web-based authentication environment as a means of maintaining security is prominent on the roadmap, and we’re comfortable that Okta’s going to enable that.”

This year, City Year recruited 2,500 corps members, and Okta improves mobile identity management for these users across multiple devices, making their jobs easier and more productive. “What we really love about Okta is that it’s completely invisible to the user,” said Welles. “We have a seamless way to go from our homepage directly to any of the applications on a pre-provision basis. Okta was really foundational to being able to execute on a cloud strategy.”

To hear our full interview with Welles, watch City Year’s customer testimonial video below or on our website.