Showcase 2021: New Capabilities, Simplifying Customer Identity and Access Management

Since 2019, Okta Showcase has served as a more intimate stage, celebrating Okta innovation. From our internal engineering triumphs, to the wins of our diverse customer base, every feature moves the needle towards identity enablement for all. 

The three features we’re celebrating today are all about flexibility, control, and tailoring: your branding, your access model—all with less code than ever before.

Branding: Easily brand your customer-facing assets such as emails, login pages, and error pages without requiring custom code.

Device Authorization Grant: Provide secure end-user access to TV apps, kiosks, and video game platforms, all while reducing registration and login friction.

Custom Administrator Roles: Create granular roles for admins to manage users, groups, and applications. Each admin level gets just the right access they need—no more, no less.

It’s your brand: create a seamless look + feel for your end-users  

Your brand is not just your logo. It should be an end-to-end experience that reflects everything about you—from company values to an interface button. Businesses have thousands of touchpoints to customize; from login pages to error messages, to email templates. In order to do this well, your developer team may be faced with hours of repetitive, manual work, spending significant cycles writing custom code.

This is why we're excited to unveil Branding, a tool for your admins to apply your brand consistently across your end-user’s journey—without wasting precious hours of dev time. Your team can easily customize customer-facing messaging and branding based on the end user's profile and application. And you can deploy these customizations without adding custom code, providing ease of implementation and increased security.

Right from the admin console, all Okta pages and templates are customizable so you can go live faster with consistent branding across your login, error pages, and email templates. Simply upload your brand assets to create a theme, then simultaneously publish that theme to all end-user touchpoints. For instance, if you have an end user that is part of a VIP group, you can provide them with customized messaging and branding for VIP members only. Need additional customization? Devs can conveniently bootstrap their custom code with base styles.

Safe, smooth, easy registration and access—across devices

If one had to name the most diverse set of users in the tech space today, it would have to be those using entertainment and leisure platforms and applications. They’re everywhere, and they expect a seamless experience.

Organizations who trade in media, travel, gaming, and retail must extend their login and registration forms to work well with a myriad of countless input-constrained devices. They include smart TV apps and speakers, video-game consoles, kiosks, and terminals. And such devices typically don't include keyboards, making for a frustrating end-user experience. 

From a security standpoint, these devices usually don’t support modern authentication factors such as face ID and fingerprints. Relying on faulty, password-based auth, they are always at risk for an account takeover.

Okta’s new Device Authorization Grant feature allows end-users to use their own phones to register and sign into applications running in input-constrained devices such as smart TVs, digital picture frames, and printers. This greatly reduces the time spent in registration and login pages, providing a seamless user experience. It also allows you to access these devices without entering a password, which enhances security and mitigates account takeovers.

A flexible approach to administration, combining security and autonomy 

Organizations have differing users and teams responsible for tasks and, to do their job securely, they each require the right level of administrative access. For example, certain admins may only manage marketing-related apps, while another is restricted to managing only engineering-related apps; not having the right customization can lead to admins with under-provisioned access or over-provisioned access, which leads to a more permissive security posture.

To enable administrators to manage applications within an organization without compromising on security, we’re excited to introduce Custom Administrator Roles, a new way to apply a least-privileged approach to administration.

Custom administrator roles can help administrators within organizations spend less time on the governance of who has access to what, saving you time with the ability to delegate various admin tasks to other admins, business units, or agencies. This reduces the tradeoff many admins currently make between granting a user too many privileges, versus taking on the additional responsibilities themselves. It provides the flexibility to meet a broad set of use cases while ensuring each admin has just the right level of access they require.

Beyond just defining what permissions an admin should have, custom administrator roles also allow you to constrain those permissions to a subset of the resources in an org, such as a group of users or a suite of apps. This allows delegated admins to manage different user groups such as suppliers and vendors independently without any visibility into each other's users or data.

Customer Spotlight: Verisk Analytics

“Verisk is a leading data analytics provider serving customers in insurance, energy and specialized markets, and financial services.” said Atul Bahl, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure, Verisk Analytics. “As a data-focused organization, security is of the utmost importance to us. Okta’s Custom Administrator Roles allow us to follow the principle of least privilege and only grant admins access to the tasks they need to perform across our many business units. We save time for our internal teams and ensure the best-in-class security of our customer applications.”

Get Started Today

And to celebrate together, all of the features mentioned above are available today in Early Access; simply turn them on in the Okta Administrator Dashboard. We’re excited to have you start working with Okta’s new features to deliver tailored customer experiences for your end users easily and securely. For more information, check out our Okta Customer Identity page, or contact us with questions.