The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are laws that emerged to give individuals greater power over their personal information. Both regulate organisations that collect and use data in a variety of ways. A brief summary of the CCPA: Gives California residents increased transparency and control…

Being authentic is a high term of praise—if we think people are authentic, we believe them to be trustworthy, loyal, and dependable. There's a similar concept in computer security. Business networks are crucial to protect, so firms want only authorised people accessing them. In cybersecurity, authentication means verifying that a person or device…

Despite the immense challenges of 2020, we saw some incredible work across our customer base over this past year. These bright spots include COVID-19 responses in healthcare, educational institutions finding creative ways to help students learn, and small businesses engaging with their local communities in meaningful ways. In all of these cases,…

What Is the Domain Name System (DNS)?  The domain name system (DNS) makes it possible for browsers, apps, and servers to load internet resources. Think of it like a phonebook—except instead of associating a person’s name with a phone number, it maps a domain name (e.g., okta.com) to an internet protocol (IP) address that can be understood by…

Put simply, personal data is information that relates to 1. an identified or identifiable person or 2. an identified or identifiable legal entity (where such information is protected similarly as personal data under applicable data protection laws and regulations). While regulations use different terms with slightly varying definitions, “personal…

Security questions are a common method of identity authentication—one you’ve probably encountered before. When creating an account or signing up for a service online, users will confidentially share the answers to secret questions with a provider.  Typically, these security questions and answers are used for self-service password recovery…

Okta’s vision is to safely enable everyone to use any technology. To achieve this ambitious mission, we’ve been investing heavily in customer identity — enabling organisations to build secure customer experiences — and transitioning from delivering products to building a true platform to address every identity use case. Today, we're taking a…

Microservices architecture, also known simply as “microservices,” is an approach to building software with modular services that are distinct and independent from each other.  In recent years, microservices have become a popular choice for designing and deploying applications. They allow apps to be broken into smaller and loosely coupled pieces …