Solid profits? Check. A growing customer base? Check. A strong team? Check. Sounds like your company ticks all the boxes of success. Then why are you still strapped for cash?
Don’t panic, you’re not alone. Cash flow challenges impact at least nine in ten small businesses in the UK. What’s important is how you deal with them, beginning with step one: finding the culprit. Could it be slow-paying vendors? High overheads? Overstocking? Seasonal fluctuations? If you’re running an ecommerce business, it might be all those things and more. If you don’t know where to begin, ask Juni.
Juni is a financial management platform that’s tailor-made for companies dealing in digital commerce. “We offer ecommerce businesses complete visibility and control over their cash flow,” explains Josef You, Head of IT Operations at Juni. ”With Juni, they get a unified view of multi-currency business accounts, flexible credit with unparalleled insights and analytics, and corporate virtual cards — all in one place.”
Growth, meet security
On its mission to help businesses take control of their finances, Juni realised that some of its own challenges mirrored those of its customers. They, too, were lacking a unified view, not of the company’s cash flow, but the flow of employee identities and access permissions. The more the company grew, the harder it became to keep track of these things manually. As Juni was preparing to obtain crucial industry certifications, such as PCI DSS, You and his team needed to streamline internal Identity and Access Management (IAM) with a centralised solution.
“Before Okta, most of our authentication came from Google SSO and passwords stored on password managers,” You says. “As a result, we had to track authentication policies for every user within each of our more than 100 applications. And because we were also growing very rapidly at the time, we had two people working almost full-time just on onboarding new employees. There were a lot of manual tasks we needed to automate, which brought us to Okta.”
Why Okta? Because Juni was looking for a flexible unified IAM and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution that would enable the company to sustain its growth by automating processes, without compromising on security. “We were looking for an Identity provider that could not only handle local device logins but also integrate with all of our cloud-based apps,” says You. “Okta was the best fit not just for our current needs, but a future-proof solution that can scale with Juni’s growth.”
Hands-off onboarding
After switching to Okta’s Workforce Identity Cloud, automating the onboarding processes was one of Juni’s first priorities. By synchronising the company’s HR system, HiBob, with Okta, the company can use it as a single source of truth for employee identities and fully automate the creation and deletion of accounts. With custom automations via Okta Lifecycle Management, Juni managed to make onboarding and offboarding fully hands-off from an IT perspective. During these crucial steps, Juni received close support from Okta partner Advania, who explained Okta’s features and helped You and his team set up their first workflows and authentication policies.
Today, when a new member joins Juni, the onboarding process is initiated by the company’s HR team and requires no involvement - other than oversight - from IT. “Before Okta, our IT team had to spend at least two hours to onboard a new employee and manually give them access to applications,” You says. “With Okta, we’ve been able to automate the entire process, which greatly reduces the workload of our IT department while giving new employees faster access to the apps they need.”
During onboarding, every Juni employee gets access to around 10 core applications, such as Google Workspace, Slack, and a VPN. But in total, Juni has integrated 62 SaaS applications with Okta, enabling employees to access them with Single Sign-On (SSO) and Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA).
“Being able to automatically enforce MFA and other authentication requirements, such as password complexity and user sessions on services that handle sensitive data, is a huge improvement,” You says. “Thanks to Okta, we no longer have to manually go in and constantly audit to make sure that users have the right level of permissions.”
Slack me some access
If a Juni employee needs access to an application that isn’t part of the initial rollout, they need to request access from the company’s IT team. Here’s where Okta Identity Governance (OIG) comes in. With OIG, You and his team have automated access configurations with self-service requests via a designated Slack channel.
“Being able to handle access requests without interference, directly as a self-service solution via Slack, is another huge win for the team, as we no longer need to have any manual interactions with the system,” You says. “This saves us, and the employees who need quick access to new apps, a lot of time.”
Using OIG’s automated request system, Juni can also give its engineers time-based, break-glass access in case they need to troubleshoot or help with ongoing incidents. These requests are audited afterwards or on the fly so as not to cause any friction for the users needing access to help.
For all these reasons, Okta has been a hit with Juni’s teams. “Our employees evidently love Okta because they regularly ask us to add new applications,” says You. “People really like having just one authentication system, and easy ways to access whatever apps they need.”
Automating audits to accelerate growth
From a security perspective, it’s important for Juni to periodically review the permissions of users who have access to critical resources. OIG enables Josef and his team to automate recurring audit campaigns with Access Certifications, and approve or revoke access when required. By introducing chat based access requests, Juni has saved over five days of keyboard time a year on actioning access requests through Okta's chat based workflows.
These Access Certifications are one of several prerequisites Juni needs to fulfil in order to obtain its ISO 27001 certification, one of the most important information security standards. “ISO 27001 is an important next step for Juni, and thanks to Okta, there are many requirements that we’ve already fulfilled,” says You. “That’s an enormous benefit for us, because it saves us lots of time.”
With every new automation, certificate, and security measure, Juni becomes an even more powerful financial platform for ecommerce companies, who trust the Juni to safeguard their money, data, and reputation. That’s why Okta has been a crucial next step on Juni’s growth journey.
“Without Okta, we couldn’t apply our strict security standards to our increasing workforce without a great deal of additional effort or resources,” says You. “Okta accelerates our growth and grows with us, enabling us to help even more ecommerce businesses take control of their cash flow.
