3 Reasons to Attend Identity & Mobility Forums from 77 Energy’s Chris Dodds
The Okta team is on the road this spring with our Identity and Mobility Forums! We recently returned from Dallas, TX where our customer Chris Dodds of Seventy Seven Energy, joined us onstage to share his journey with Okta. Below he shares his highlights from the Forum:
From Chris Dodds, Cloud Architect at 77 Energy:
Navigating the cloud-connected world is hard. When you ask questions, legacy vendors tend towards selling you more of what you've done in the past, and inversely, a lot of "cloud" companies have trouble fitting traditional business needs into their model.
So you get stuck without a lifeline, which never feels great. Because of that, I'm always excited when I get opportunities to talk to my peers facing similar challenges and technology companies who can put their solutions in my frame of reference. That's why I loved Okta's recent Identity & Mobility Forum in Dallas, Texas.
Okta was kind enough to invite me onstage at the Forum to share some of the lessons I’ve learned while deploying identity in the cloud. The 77 Energy story is unique in that we had the opportunity to build our infrastructure with a clean slate when we spun off from Chesapeake Energy in 2014. As we started building a cloud infrastructure to make our organization more flexible, we realized that we would have to keep a few legacy applications in the mix. By implementing Okta to manage access to over 100 applications for our employees, we’ve been able to improve our end users’ experience and enhance security.
In turn, I also got to learn from other Okta customers and talk with IT leaders about the challenges we all face. The schedule was fast-paced and never descended into the soul-sucking slog that sometimes occurs at these types of events. Here were a few highlights:
- User-friendly sessions: The Okta-led sessions put their technology in context for the problems it helps solve, like my favorite, mobile device password syncing. The teams also provided helpful insight into where Okta is headed in the future.
- Access to the Okta team: It was a great opportunity to meet with experts on the Okta product team to ask questions and also provide feedback. It’s often difficult to get to product folks at other companies, but Okta does a great job of putting them front and center.
- Connections: To be honest, my favorite takeaways from the event were the conversations I had with peers. These sidebar discussions are easily the most overlooked benefit of events like Okta’s Identity and Mobility Forums and the company has set up the perfect environment to foster those discussions.
Whether you’re an existing or future Okta customer-- if you have the opportunity to attend a Forum near you, I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
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Next, we’re headed to Washington D.C. on May 3 and across the pond to London on May 10 where you’ll have the opportunity to hear from other forward-thinking IT leaders, like Chris. Check out the agenda, save your spot and follow along with #OktaForum!
