Trust is the New Frontier: The Okta Identity Cloud’s Role

In 2011, Marc Andreessen voiced his prediction that software was eating the world. At the time, this was a bold claim. But, today at Oktane19, we discussed that your company already is a technology company, and that comes with both the benefits and challenges technology companies face.

While undergoing digital transformation is a necessity, it brings new obstacles to light. Not only do organizations struggle to find the talent they need to bring them into this new age, they’re also grappling with the best way to handle consumer data. User consent and privacy has taken center stage, and consumers share a mounting concern over the implications of giving their data away to corporations. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a gradual (and then, not so gradual) erosion of trust in technology. If every company is a technology company, the recent erosion of trust in tech could open up your company to more scrutiny too.

At Okta, we believe deeply in the potential for technology, and that for organizations of all sizes and industries: trust is the new frontier. Today, businesses need to both adopt technology that enables them to innovate while prioritizing the security, privacy, and consent controls that help them to be trusted. We believe Okta is uniquely positioned to empower organizations navigating this new frontier.

This morning at Oktane, we announced a breadth of new products and functionalities that will make it easier than ever for companies to keep trust at the core of everything they do.

Encouraging trust starts with opening new doors for organizations to extend the power of the Okta platform. With the announcement of Okta Hooks, we’re unlocking the power of deep, custom integrations from and into the Okta Identity Cloud. This brand new type of integration In the Okta Integration Network (OIN) lets customers use their own code to easily customize Okta policies and behaviors, creating completely new types of custom integrations and downstream workflows—all tied to identity.

But we took the “power of open” a step further. We also exposed the foundation of The Okta Identity Cloud — a set of building blocks for identity that we call the Okta Identity Engine. The Okta Identity Engine is a way for you to develop any identity experience you can possibly imagine. Now, you have access to a set of powerful, open, flexible tools to deliver trusted, tailored identity experiences to suit any modern use case.

We also tapped into an opportunity to create new products that meet an increasingly important use case: securing access to critical infrastructure. We knew we could do more to protect our customers’ most precious assets — their servers — so we created Advanced Server Access to bring continuous, contextual access management to secure cloud infrastructure. And to further solve the hybrid IT access problem, we introduced Okta Access Gateway to enable seamless single sign-on access, management, and visibility into on-premises applications through the Okta Identity Cloud.

Finally, Okta’s new Risk-Based Authentication brings actionable intelligence to Okta’s adaptive authentication products, leveraging machine learning capabilities to enhance transparency and deliver greater security. This solution recognizes that no two users are alike and uses individualized machine learning to provide automated detection of identity-based attacks. It enables enterprises to implement significantly stronger authentication techniques and remediation when the scenario calls for it, while enabling seamless user experiences for normal authentications.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve had the opportunity to harness the promise of technology and help enable the digital revolution for our customers. In the next 10 years, we look forward to making technology companies, trusted ones.