Shire: Partnering with Okta to Help Improve Lives

Shire has a clear mission: to enable people to lead better lives. Whether through treatments in neuroscience, rare diseases or regenerative medicine, there aren’t many companies with more dedication to improving people's lives than Shire.

“We’re a company that touches almost every aspect that a business can be in,” said Bob Litterer, senior director of information security compliance at Shire. “We start at research and go onto development and manufacturing. We have sales, marketing and all of the typical business functions — we have it all. We also have a very diverse group of people outside of Shire that we need to collaborate with, so our IT at Shire needs to be able to evolve from the old model to one that is much more diverse, mobile and agile.”

In order to make this transition seamless, Shire needed a partner that would enable them to better address the cloud in existing functions and help them reach the cloud in new ways.

“We went looking for a partner. We needed an identity broker in the cloud, one that already had this down. There was no learning curve, they knew how to do identity in the cloud for other providers that are standards based, they could easily integrate with our internal environment, and they hopefully had a very large group of pre-integrated applications that we already used.”

How did it go? Beautifully. But don’t take our word for it; take Bob’s.

“The adoption of Okta has been very seamless. In fact, the integration synchronization between our directory and Okta took 20 minutes, honestly. Maybe 30 minutes at a stretch. It was up and running in that respect faster than I thought possible, to the point where I said, ‘this can’t be it? This really can’t be it.' But it really was. Shire can’t stand still, never will stand still, in trying to find better ways to serve our patients and to help them lead better lives, and Okta helps me get them there.”

To hear our full interview with Bob, watch Shire’s customer testimonial video below or on our web site.