Groupon

Alan Mcintosh:  At Groupon, our approach to IT has been to leverage Cloud applications as much as possible; in order to work with the minimal amount of resources it takes to get the job done.

At Groupon, we needed a solution like Okta to solve some key business challenges, specifically around security and compliance. Now that we're a publicly traded company, we needed to be able to meet some SOX requirements, and Okta provides the framework in order to solve those challenges.

Before Okta, we simply had active directory, and it was a fragmented directory in the sense that we're a global business, and we didn't have active directory rolled out within all of our countries. So, moving to Okta enabled us to have a centralized, unified, identity and access management platform, so we could service our customers globally.

The features that we like most about Okta, are the Okta application network, and the in-depth active directory integration. With the Okta application network, Okta has went ahead and done most of the heavy lifting for us; in terms of making connections out to our Cloud applications and SAS applications, and this greatly reduces the time to deployment. With active directory, we're able to leverage the data that we already have in our internal directory system, and manage the security, provision users, and essentially manage the employee life-cycle.

Since the time that we actually started integrating Okta with our Cloud and SAS apps, the end users have been very responsive, and have advised us that Okta has become a critical part of their daily activities, and is now part of something that they use every day.

At Groupon, we definitely feel like we made the right decision going with Okta. The rapid adoption and the ease of use of which the Okta platform enables connections out into the CLOUD network and the SAS applications, has made a big difference to our company.

If you're not using Okta now, I highly suggest you take a look at it. Okta is a very light-weight, yet strategic platform for any business, because it provides identity and access management, and does so in a method that lets your IT team continue to worry about the stuff they have to do on a daily basis, and let Okta do all of the heavy lifting.