Okta Showcase: Highlighting Our Culture of Innovation

Since its inception, Okta has been known for its innovation. We were the first company to treat identity as an independent platform, recognizing its power within the increasingly cloud-centric enterprise and its integral role in digital customer experiences. We’ve continued to drive the Okta Identity Cloud forward, enabling any organization to use any technology. And along the way, we hosted semi-annual, internal Launch Day events, sharing the latest and greatest from our product and engineering teams — and for the first time, we’ve decided to invite the public to join us.

Out of that desire to share our innovations, Okta Showcase was born. While our annual customer conference, Oktane, provides us an opportunity to expand on the importance of identity in a broad way, Okta Showcase shines a spotlight on how identity innovations are changing the game. Today’s Showcase event focuses on the rapidly evolving world for some of the biggest companies on the planet.

Since 2000, 52 percent of Fortune 500 companies have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or gone out of business. The world’s largest organizations are facing a sort of Digital Darwinism, and it's not the strongest who will survive; it’s those most adaptable to change.

That’s why today at Okta Showcase, we announced new product innovations and momentum in personalized security, scalability, and hybrid IT access that make it easier for large enterprises to evolve, grow, and digitally transform. We believe identity sits at the foundation of technology creation and adoption, and our new solutions enable the world’s largest organizations to securely adopt technology and build differentiated products at scale.

Maintaining a global workforce of tens of thousands of employees eliminates traditional perimeters and opens a massive attack surface for large scale businesses. To address this, we unveiled SecurityInsights, a technology family that delivers transparency and empowers big companies to make informed security decisions faster. New features include UserInsight, suspicious activity reporting that helps CISOs harness their vast collection of users to identify and remediate compromised accounts, and HealthInsight, which enables customized security best practice recommendations for administrators. These features join ThreatInsight to protect organizations before attacks fully manifest by delivering data-driven insights at three critical levels: to end-users, administrators, and across the customer network.

But we didn’t stop there. Global businesses build technology to engage with their user bases through different channels and services, and across these environments, they need to deliver best-in-class performance for identity experiences. Historically, on-premises, custom-built management solutions have been plagued by chronic instability, costly development demands, and infrastructure maintenance. With DynamicScale, Okta has moved far beyond the current landscape to exceed the identity needs of the internet’s largest and most highly-trafficked sites and apps. DynamicScale supports traffic bursts of up to 500,000 authentications per minute, offering the promise of diverse identity workflows at any scale.

Making it possible for large organizations to seamlessly adopt new technology also means recognizing that their current tech stack may not only be forward-looking. We know the world’s largest companies still rely on mission-critical, on-premises applications that are 30 to 40 years old, in addition to the cloud applications they’re rapidly adopting. We introduced Okta Access Gateway earlier this year to address the hybrid IT access problem and extend Okta to on-prem systems — and we’ve seen significant momentum since unveiling it. Now, by delivering unified security, improving end-user and admin experience, and reducing costs, organizations like Alliance Data Systems and Hitachi are relying on Okta Access Gateway to create more cohesive, secure, and efficient access and management of hybrid IT apps. Starting November 1, Okta Access Gateway will be available to everyone.

Beyond building innovative products, we’re engaging with partners to offer more to our collective ecosystems and drive broader customer impact together. Our new partnership with Atlassian further accelerates cloud adoption for large organizations by centralizing their access to Atlassian cloud products. By integrating Okta’s authentication technology into Atlassian products, both new and existing Atlassian customers can give their workforces secure access to the cloud tools they need to be successful.

The world’s largest organizations need to evolve to keep up with the ever-changing business landscape—and identity is key to helping them survive and thrive in today’s age of Digital Darwinism. While we’re proud of what we’ve built and the over 7,000 customers we serve today, we know that it’s still early for us. We look forward to continuing to innovate, grow, and execute on our vision to securely connect any organization to any technology.

Again, our innovation is what drives us, and our favorite time of year to bring it all together is our annual Oktane conference. Registration for Oktane20 is now open, and you can do that here.