Okta & Telecommunication Services

Whether you are leveraging Okta for workforce or customer identity, telephony is an important service that enables an organization’s employees, partners, resellers, suppliers, distributors, and consumers to authenticate using SMS text messages or voice calls.

As an Okta administrator, you can use telephony—SMS and voice—for several scenarios:

• To issue a challenge that requires a response from the user to verify an authenticating factor
• To enroll a device for multi-factor authentication (MFA) by verifying that the phone is in the possession of the user who will be authenticated
• To authorize a password reset
• To authorize an account unlock

Okta’s industry-leading identity management platform helps organizations provide secure access to company resources, while providing the flexibility needed to meet the different needs of an organization’s end-users.

An important benefit of Telephony as a method for authentication, is that end-users appreciate the ease-of-use and familiarity of leveraging SMS and voice for fulfilling the MFA requirement, for instance. If you’re interested in exploring other authentication methods, check out this resource.

In partnership with leading telco providers, such as Telesign, Twilio, and Vonage, Okta now provides the ability for organizations to bring their own telco provider using the Okta Telephony Inline Hook. Benefits include:

• Ability to configure any provider to deliver SMS and Voice messages for all use cases at no additional cost
• Control over the brand experience, such as short codes, SenderIDs, etc.
• More easily troubleshoot deliverability issues
• Greater control over data residency