#LifeAtOkta

You might not know this, but we’ve got some pretty fascinating people working behind the scenes at Okta. We sat down with one of them – senior UX designer Brian Hansen – to discover what’s in the company’s special sauce, discussing what he does day-to-day, why he chose Okta and what drives him to come to work every morning (and no, we don’t mean…

Big changes are affecting the enterprise as increased cloud and mobile adoption pushes businesses further beyond the firewall — and IT is right in the middle. That’s why we’ve gathered senior IT leaders from Ralph Loura (CIO, Clorox), Carl Eberling (CIO, Encore Capital), Evan Trent (SVP, School of Rock) and Dan Willey (CIO, Wilbur-Ellis) for an…

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at, “HR 2.0: Dealing with Fast Growth in Technology,” about how technology companies (and their HR departments) can more effectively attract and retain talent. The rapid growth in the technology industry is exciting and staggering and has only been seen a few times in history. As Okta’s director of people,…

How can entrepreneurs build culture, and why is it important? That's the topic of the week on the Wall Street Journal's "Accelerators" blog, and CEO Todd McKinnon joins the discussion: Long-term success is not predicated on creating a world-class company culture. Many of the strongest technology companies today thrive because, in their earliest…

I recently kicked off a blog series about the importance of securing Layer 7, otherwise known as the application layer in the OSI model. It’s a critical part of Okta’s security program because Layer 7 is closest to our users, and also because Okta’s cloud-based IDM solution integrates with on-premises and external SaaS identity stories, mobile…

Our CEO, Todd McKinnon, recently sat down with Mike Abbott, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for a TechCrunch TV "Founder Stories" segment. Todd discusses what it takes to grow a successful company, tactics for hiring the right people and lessons he learned moving from engineer to CEO, to name a few. Head over to…

Are ex-entrepreneurs best equipped to succeed as venture capitalists? That’s the topic of the week over at the Wall Street Journal’s ‘Accelerators’ blog, and I weigh in: When Investing in CEOs, It Takes One to Know One. Successful VCs come in all shades but, in my mind, those who have started their own companies have a little something extra in…

In enterprise software and services, there’s one thing you can always count on: vendor marketing teams delivering glossy customer case studies. Well, Okta does those too, we can’t lie. But ours are better. The best customer case studies are those done by third parties. Forrester Consulting recently spent time analyzing identity management at…

The New York Times recently ran an interesting profile of Peter Neumann, one of the preeminent computer scientists in the world. The story, “Killing the Computer to Save it,” details Neumann’s ideas for how to solve the inherent security vulnerabilities in computer systems that have been repeated again and again for the past 50+ years. Neumann’s…

I recently released the first, second and third installments of a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service, and the three characteristics that differentiate an enterprise-grade cloud service from a typical consumer service: security, reliability and trust. As a quick refresher, there are five categories to…