Accelerating The Move to Office 365 and Enabling Your Cloud/Mobile Future of Choice

“When it comes to Office 365, the vision is pretty straightforward. It is to make sure that the 1 billion Office users and growing can have access to the high-fidelity Office experience on every device they love to use." - Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

From the top down, Microsoft has made it clear that Office 365 is core to their strategy. At Okta, we’re in the center of the dramatic shift IT is making to a cloud and mobile architecture and we’ve seen the impact of Microsoft’s focus in the market first-hand. We have hundreds of customers today using Okta with Office 365, and those customers have helped us shape our Microsoft roadmap.

Today we are announcing new functionality and a broad set of investments that will make it even easier for customers to seamlessly and securely adopt Office 365. And, as always, they can also use Okta to secure and manage all of their applications, be they on-premises, in the cloud, from Microsoft or from any other vendor.

We built Okta from the ground up as a native cloud service, so and integration with Office 365 powered by Okta is secure, low-cost and scalable. We believe that you should not be required to install a big, cumbersome, on-premises software footprint to harness the value of the cloud. Specifically, this means Okta customers will not need to use ADFS, Azure AD Sync (DirSync) or Microsoft Identity Manager software to securely adopt Office 365. Okta will handle all of that – from the cloud.

More than just a technology statement, Okta has also invested to ensure we have tight alignment with the Microsoft ecosystem to provide a great overall experience for joint customers. We are a Microsoft Silver Certified Identity and Access Management partner, our integration is “Works with Office 365”-certified and we have a growing ecosystem of Microsoft system integrators, including Slalom Consulting, Softchoice, Intellinet and Convergent Computing.

From technology to Microsoft certification to an ecosystem of Microsoft partners, we have Office 365 covered.

But we also believe that a move to a cloud, mobile architecture needs to include choice. While Office 365 may be a critical collaboration platform for an organization, every customer we talk to has other applications from other vendors and wants one solution to connect across all of their apps and devices.

Stephen Landry, the CIO over at Seton Hall University and an Okta customer summarized the value of using Okta with Office 365 in our press release:

"Implementation was an absolute breeze. Almost immediately, we enabled single sign-on to our full suite of Office 365 applications, including OneDrive and Lync, as well as other hosted applications, such as our campus portal and Blackboard LMS. Not only is Okta a great convenience for our students and faculty, but it allows most instructional work to take place fully in the cloud, ensuring that our core business of teaching and learning can continue independent of campus technology services."

We are very excited about the focus that Microsoft is putting on the cloud and Office 365 as a core part of that strategy. Okta is committed to being the best identity and access solution not only for Office 365, but for any app from any vendor.

In a cloud and mobile future with Okta, the choice is yours.

To learn more about Okta’s new integration with Office 365, visit https://www.okta.com/office365 – and be sure to check out the Okta for Microsoft Community at https://community.okta.com/groups/microsoft.

For more information about how to become an Okta Solution Provider, visit www.okta.com/wpc.