Trust and Transparency – the New Okta Trust and Status Sites

As a cloud-native company, our customers are counting on us to be globally accessible, have 100% reliable service, and maintain up-to-date security policies -- in other words, be always on.

All of that depends on trust. And that trust starts with transparency.

So with trust and transparency as our dual goals, we’re excited to announce two new sites: Okta’s trust microsite at trust.okta.com and Okta Status at status.okta.com.

It Starts with Transparency

Let’s face it - adopting a cloud service can be a bit scary. You’re putting key portions of your business into the hands of a third party, you don’t control the service, and you don’t have access to the infrastructure. How do you know if the service is reliable? After all, if it’s a business critical function, like identity, even a few minutes of downtime can be hugely disruptive to an organization.

You can always refer to other customers’ experiences to give you an idea of the reliability and benefits, but a trustworthy company will also be proactive in sharing their system status and uptime history.

The importance of maintaining transparency with our customers is why Okta has moved its system status information to a dedicated Okta Status site. This is where you’ll now find all the familiar metrics on Okta’s service including our current operational status as well as service history. We’ve also added a couple of new helpful features.

First, we’ve added “per-cell” system status information. Okta’s architecture is built to scale and is divided into self-contained instances of the Okta service called “cells.” As a true multi-tenant cloud service, our customers’ tenants are hosted in one or more of these cells. Customers may have tenants or orgs in various cells for geographical reasons (like to keep European data isolated to comply with GDPR requirements) or regulatory compliance reasons (such as in the case of our healthcare customers in our HIPAA compliant cell). Now, by logging into Okta Status, you can see the service status for each specific cell. So now, if some users are experiencing slower-than-usual service, you can check to see if the specific cell you’re hosted in is experiencing service degradation.

Second, we’ve also added links to useful administrator reports so you can access your organization’s individual service history after logging into Okta Status as an admin. These report links give you quick access to useful troubleshooting information, such as logins and single sign on attempts within your org.

Building and Maintaining Trust

There’s a lot that goes into building trust, and maintaining it is just as important. We know that for our customers, having visibility into Okta’s security practices and compliance attestations are critical for building and maintaining that trust. So we’re consolidating all security, compliance, and system performance information detailed above to a single Trust microsite to make it easier for our customers to find this information.

The new Trust microsite will be our customers’ go-to hub for resources on Okta’s approach to security and how we secure the Okta service. Expect to find everything Okta security-related — from our security controls and secure development process to how to use Okta to secure your own org. The Trust site will also host all compliance resources, with links to all of Okta’s certifications, like our SOC 2 Type II and CSA STAR attestation, as well as how Okta can help you meet your organization’s own compliance requirements. And of course, you can still navigate to the Okta Status page mentioned previously through our Trust site as well.

So make sure to update your bookmarks to point to Okta Status for system status information and check out our Trust site for all security and compliance resources. And if you have any feedback for us, please let us know! We’re always open to feedback and improvement ideas. Because Okta is the identity company that stands for trust.