What if… Your Employees Could Achieve Office-Level Productivity from Home?

Wake up. Eat breakfast. Commute. Work. Commute. Eat dinner. Watch Netflix. Sleep. Repeat. 

It’s hard to believe that, almost a year ago, that’s what “business as usual” looked like. With COVID-19 still running rampant across the globe, many employees are still working from home while juggling personal responsibilities too. As a result, most daily routines look a lot more like this:

Wake up. Work. Eat breakfast. Work. Homeschool. Work. Make lunch. Work. Take a few deep breaths. Work. Homeschool. Work. Eat dinner. Work. Sleep. Repeat.

It’s no surprise that productivity is a concern for many employers. When you add common productivity drains like delayed access to business-critical apps, IT tools with a steep learning curve, and unnecessary downtime on top of everything else, the challenges can feel insurmountable. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Modernisation made easy 

When the pandemic arrived, existing Okta customers had an advantage because most of them were already well-positioned with agile IT environments and productivity-boosting processes. As a result, they were able to react quickly by leveraging cloud-based tools like Zoom, Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect, and Citrix AnyConnect. And it didn’t take long for new customers to catch up, because every Okta purchase comes with years of identity expertise—baked in.

Over the years, Okta has helped thousands of organisations modernise their legacy environments. Oxfam International, for example, approached Okta when it was looking for ways to help employees access shared knowledge and resources while working in the field. 

The organisation wanted to roll out a custom-built intranet, plus a range of SaaS apps, including Box, Workplace by Facebook, and ServiceNow. First, however, Oxfam needed to figure out how to provide unified, secure access to 20 affiliates, each with its own Active Directory. 

By engaging Okta, Oxfam was able to layer strong authentication and authorisation across all affiliates. This created a hybrid IT environment that allowed Oxfam to keep some of its legacy infrastructure, while providing the flexibility to adopt SaaS products that would enable collaboration and productivity across directories—and borders. 

“Once we got Box to scale and had the services up and running, we were able to move ahead quite rapidly with new products as they came along,” says Grant Holton Picard, Enterprise Architect for Oxfam International. “Oxfam’s IT team started with Workplace by Facebook, and from the moment it was first introduced as an idea, it only took six months to fully deploy the app.”

Picking up the Slack 

There are other IT challenges affecting employee productivity as well. Some organisations are struggling to balance convenience and security, while others lack automated provisioning and self-service options.

When Slack signed on with Okta, the company was looking to solve those same challenges. The company started by simultaneously strengthening security and simplifying employee access with Okta Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication—but it didn’t stop there. As a collaboration company, productivity is one of Slack’s top priorities, so it also wanted to find a way to quickly provision employees, while continuing to meet stringent regulatory guidelines.   

Slack’s solution? Okta Workflows. Using Workflows’ simple graphical interface, Slack was able to program a process that allows new employees to self-provision their first seven apps. All they have to do is send a request through a specific Slack channel. Using Okta’s Lifecycle Management, Slack was able to integrate 20 additional apps, and it’s almost as easy for employees to access those. After an employee submits a request, IT can provision (and deprovision) those apps with the simple click of a button.

Now, new employees can start working right away, whether they’re in the office or at home. And if an employee does have to wait (briefly) for IT to provision a new app, they never even have to leave Slack to find out the status of their request: the company has also programmed Workflows to notify employees through Slack as soon as they’ve been granted access. Best of all, Okta provided an expert to support Slack’s deployment process.

“Our Customer Success Manager has been tremendous and so has everyone else she's brought to the table,” says Curtis Salinas, Senior Director, Strategic Planning & Operations at Slack. “When we needed to meet our SOX standards, we went from ‘Oh my God, our heads are going to explode’ to ‘Oh wow, there’s a simple way to get this done.’ Okta just provided it, and we were off to the races.”

Reach peak productivity 

No matter what your current IT stack looks like, Okta’s Workforce products can help you consolidate your environment, streamline your processes, and give you the flexibility to simply and quickly integrate with thousands of applications. 

Curious about the savings and new efficiencies you can expect from Okta identity? Take our ROI quiz and get the answers you need. Ready to make your remote employees more productive today? Talk to our sales team.