How Okta Helped Teknion Find Feng Shui with IT
The ancient Chinese used the principals of feng shui to make their workspace healthier and more fortunate by balancing a space’s energy. Though not entirely dependent on the elemental energies, Teknion puts just as much thought and passion into the development of their office solutions. With that in mind, we set out to determine how Teknion planned to apply feng shui to their IT.
“We have great customers - 2,000 globally - who have big expectations of us, and we want to meet their expectations. Technology has a big role in that,” says John Comacchio, Senior VP and CIO at Teknion, about his company’s customer-facing IT, emphasizing visual, virtual, mobile and social IT strategies. “Because we’re worldwide and a mid-cap company, we don’t have all the resources of multi-nationals. We need time to market, we need to get to our customers fast, and we need to get to our people fast around the globe—the cloud helps us with that.”
John described his frustration with the delays and extensive processes of traditional infrastructures like VPN, explaining how it ultimately led the team to seek a cloud-based solution like Okta.
“We started looking at companies like Okta, and we discovered that this is the way to do it: we do single sign-in on the cloud, then let the cloud, Okta, handshake with the on-prem systems, the AD, and have it do all the work seamlessly behind the scenes, so that the actual consumer—our users—didn’t feel that pain.”
John also explained how Okta’s specific features also made the end-user experience easier for both consumers and employees alike.
“A top feature I like about Okta is that it provisions automatically with certain clouds. We’re a user of Box.com, and it provisions automatically with Box, as well as with Salesforce. That automatic handshake makes life a lot easier for us. [I also like] the handshake with the Okta Directory: it’s seamless, and doesn’t have the laborious administration part of AD. Once we set up AD once, and Okta handshakes, it’s a single source, which makes it a lot easier for our IT folks and, of course, our end users. They just love the single sign on, which seems to them to be a dream, so we support that.”
Sounds like things are balanced well for Teknion with Okta.
To hear our full interview with John, watch Teknion’s customer testimonial video on our web site.