Showcasing Customer Momentum with Okta Access Gateway: Hybrid IT for the World’s Largest Organisations
In order to stay competitive in today’s modern world, organisations need to effectively leverage technology. That’s why they’re adopting more cloud applications than ever before: according to our most recent Businesses @ Work report, large companies are deploying 163 apps on average. And over the past four years, our large customers have increased their number of deployed apps by 68%. At the same time, 85% of the world’s largest organisations plan to have at least a third of their applications still running on-premises. This explosion of cloud, paired with the required maintenance of on-prem solutions, leads to challenges for the world’s largest organisations: namely, managing a hybrid IT environment.
That’s why we introduced Okta Access Gateway at Oktane19, to extend the power of Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multifactor Authentication (MFA) to on-prem systems. Okta Access Gateway enables organisations with hybrid IT environments to achieve simple and secure resource management across their legacy and cloud systems. It helps customers significantly cut the costs of the infrastructure needed to manage legacy identity system, and collapses the operational costs of managing and patching those systems. In addition, with Okta Access Gateway, customers can now unify their security with the latest MFA across all applications, whether cloud or on-prem, enabling organisations to move away from identity silos. Ultimately, it empowers organisations to standardise their identity platform from cloud-to-ground with Okta.
Nexteer Unifies Security to Empower Workforce with Access from Anywhere at Anytime
Nexteer, a global leader in intuitive motion control, recognised the need to unify its approach to identity management across its cloud apps and on-premises systems to better protect its people and data. Nexteer has mission-critical applications in its on-prem data center, and with Okta Access Gateway, the company can fulfill its vision of ”Anytime, Anywhere, Authorized” access, while enabling workforce productivity for its 13,000+ employees across locations on six continents.
“We’re committed to providing advanced steering and driveline solutions that enable a new era of safety and performance for our customers around the world. In order to do that, our employees—no matter where they are located—need to be able to access the tools they need to be successful. Okta Access Gateway enables our employees to access our on-prem applications, allowing us to uphold our investments in existing in-house hosted web applications, while simultaneously supporting our new cloud investments,” said Arun DeSouza, CISO, Nexteer. “We’re excited to be able to enact our strategy of Identity as the Digital Perimeter with Okta to enable the business and empower our global workforce to do their best work.”
Alliance Data: Ensuring Consistent End User Experience Through M&A
Alliance Data, a Fortune 500 provider of loyalty and marketing services, fuels its growth through M&A, completing multiple acquisitions over the past few years. With this rapid growth, its complex, distributed, on-prem infrastructure caused significant friction for both end-users and IT admins, and became difficult and expensive to maintain. Alliance Data turned to Okta, adopting Okta Access Gateway (in addition to Universal Directory, Single Sign-On, and Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication) to centralise access management across its 100 apps, 16 of which are on-prem, for its 20,000 users.
“With Alliance Data's rapid growth over the last decade, we needed a way to secure company data while streamlining the onboarding process, without disrupting our user’s experience. With Okta Access Gateway, we were able to reduce the complexity for both our IT staff and our end-users, providing a seamless acquisition experience while improving our security posture and ensuring our customers’ privacy,” said Darren Linden, Head of Corporate IT Services at Alliance Data.
With Okta Access Gateway, Alliance Data completely streamlined its end-user experience. The company saw a reduction in help desk calls for password resets, ultimately making its employees more productive and improving their overall experience at work.
Hitachi's Cloud-First Approach Results in Cost Savings
Hitachi has been transforming its business model from simply building and selling products to developing solutions that enhance the customer experience. This shift inspired Hitachi to change its own processes, selecting cloud solutions over the legacy options that created friction for employees and IT with their cumbersome, manual IT processes, and came with significant expense. Hitachi selected Okta Access Gateway to support its new hybrid environment, streamlining the company’s user experience across its partners ecosystem and global employees, and deprecating its on-prem identity solution, resulting in significant cost savings for the company. In addition, as the company has continued to grow through M&A, Okta has been instrumental in streamlining the process of migrating applications used by employees and partners, improving the overall user experience, increasing security, and saving Hitachi from significant development costs that often come with integrations.
“Our recent focus has been on transforming from a product-based company to a solutions and services-based company,” says Ashish Sanghrajka, CIO of Hitachi Americas and EMEA. “In order to enable our workforce to be productive and agile throughout this transition, we needed an IT infrastructure that was more scalable and cost-efficient, while keeping security a top priority. Okta Access Gateway was the right technology for transforming our legacy authentication infrastructure without disrupting the legacy systems.”
Our vision is to enable any organisation to use any technology—whether on-prem and in the cloud. And although we’re proud of Okta Access Gateway’s early traction across our customer base, we know we’re just getting started.
Okta Access Gateway will be generally available beginning on November 1. To learn more about how to connect your on-prem solutions and cloud applications with Okta Access Gateway, check out our product page. And be sure to tune into the Okta Showcase live stream on October 10th to hear from Okta customers about their experience with the Okta Identity Cloud and to learn about new product innovations and momentum. Listen in right here!
