Identity Insiders: Basketball coach turned Identity coach Jami Baker
“Choice, not chance.”
While simplistic on the surface, Jami Baker’s driving motto — learned after years playing college basketball despite her 5’2” frame — is her formula for success. “I’ve always set goals and worked hard to achieve them,” Baker, Identity and Access Management Engineer and Okta SME for Michigan State University, says.
Baker took advantage of available Okta trainings to jumpstart her career in Identity. “I won’t sit back and hope something great comes my way. By the time I was 30, I made a complete career change, earned another degree, and worked hard to get into IT and eventually Identity.”
The epitome of a born coach, Baker welcomes challenges, tackles issues without flinching, and unites and instructs people in various roles so the game plan comes together. And as a third generation MSU alumna, she’s unabashedly dedicated to her team, the Spartans. She even displays the two Big Ten championship rings she earned during her tenure with the Michigan State women’s basketball team.
Baker's tenacity and collaborative spirit have opened doors in her career and made her a champion of people of all backgrounds and technical aptitudes in her quest to keep them safe from Identity attacks and other cybersecurity threats. “If people don’t even realize they’re using Okta or our SSO system, we’ve done a great job,” she says.
Even coaches need coaches
Baker began her 10-year career with the Michigan State women’s basketball team as a graduate assistant. After earning her master’s degree in sports administration, she eventually moved on to roles as Assistant Video Coordinator and Head Video Coordinator. Her time with the team sparked her initial interest in tech.
“Basically, if it had an on/off switch in the office, I was responsible for it,” Baker says. With a locker room full of video boards, plus more video boards and 12 Macs with video editing software in the office, she had a lot to keep up with.
She knew she was on the right track to a new career field but needed a push. One colleague, in particular, was a catalyst for that decision.
“Someone who kind of flipped a switch for me was [Head of Security Operation at Michigan State] Nicholas Oas. At the time, he was working with us to put in a brand new video server for us and for men’s basketball,” Baker says.
Oas worked with Baker, asking and answering questions that helped her learn more about IT on a granular level. When she told him she was interested in a career change, Oas encouraged her, citing her inquisitive nature as a major asset. In fact, Baker says Oas mentored her and helped her find her first IT job in desktop support, also at Michigan State. “I don’t know if Nicholas really knows how much of an influence he had on my IT career, but he certainly did.”
Curiosity opens doors
Baker stayed in her desktop support role for a couple of years, knowing it was a temporary stop along her career trajectory. (Another trait of the greatest coaches: Baker plans 10 steps ahead while staying flexible and open to changes.) In her first two weeks in Identity, she read every piece of documentation she could and watched every relevant Okta video she could access. At the beginning, “I wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of Identity or SSO,” she says. “And now that’s all that I do.”
While in desktop support, Baker’s manager offered her the time to study and earn certifications. “I used that time to the fullest,” Baker says. “Every single Monday for four hours, I was studying. If you're provided that time, you’ve gotta take advantage of it because you never know what door that’s going to open.”
Baker felt the familiar urge to change roles again, and luckily she had a connection. While job shadowing with the MSU Messaging and Collaboration team, she made an impression on Assistant Director of Application Platforms, Liam Day, who hired her in her current role.
“I’m so grateful for this opportunity that he gave me,” Baker says. “Okta’s available training empowered me to be capable of supporting a university of this size and complexity with zero Identity experience. Without that training out there, it would have been impossible for me to be successful in this role. At this point, I don’t see myself abandoning the Identity space any time soon.”
Identity at scale
When Baker mentions the “size and complexity” of Michigan State, she’s not exaggerating. MSU is a land-grant university. It was one of the first founded in the nation, and it’s consistently one of the top research universities in the world. The school boasts over 51,000 students currently enrolled, almost 6,000 faculty and staff, and more than 634,000 alumni around the world.
They have over 700 applications behind Okta and over 675,000 users within their org. Her typical day involves working with application owners and vendors to get their service behind Okta, rolling out updates, and coordinating major projects across departments.
“We’re in the middle of a couple of projects right now, one being able to utilize adaptive MFA with Okta FastPass,” Baker says. “Getting that rolled out to everyone is going to be fantastic.” Jami’s other big project is continuing to put their legacy on-premises authentication services behind Okta for a better overall user experience without sacrificing security. “We have about 100 apps that aren’t using Okta right now. So a big responsibility of mine is to work with the app owner and say, ‘Hey, let’s get it over to Okta. It’s going to be a better experience for everyone.’”
Empowering people
Another goal for Jami is helping everyone access technology safely (sounds familiar…). As someone who wasn’t always an IT expert, she knows there’s a learning curve, and not every user will have the same technical aptitude. “We want to make it as even a playing field from everyone’s perspective as possible. From an app owner perspective, if we get things behind Okta, it makes it easier to control access to it.”
Baker is a natural defender, perhaps another extension of her basketball background. “We’re empowering people and users to be successful,” she says. “After hearing about people being scammed for money by phishing attempts and compromised accounts, we wanted to build a more secure system for them. Once we had Office 365 put behind Okta and then enabled MFA in front of it, our compromised accounts went down to almost nothing when we used to have literally thousands a year. It was a full-time job on our Messaging and Collaboration team just dealing with compromised accounts. My whole career has dealt with coaching people to some degree, and in this Identity space, I still get to do that.”
So, what does Baker see in the future of Identity, as her career track is just unfolding? Her focus remains on helping users by improving security and user experience by streamlining the login process. “Passkeys are pretty awesome. Getting rid of passwords entirely would be phenomenal. I don’t know if we can do that entirely, but the fewer passwords you can have out there, I think the better.”
Are you looking to propel your organization toward the future of Identity like Baker but unsure where to start? Read our Workforce Identity buyer's guide to learn about the solutions you need and the steps you can take to create a successful Workforce Identity infrastructure.
About Michigan State University
Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 165 years. One of the world's leading public research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 400 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.
