How Okta empowers OLX Group to make global trade a local experience
Trade is everywhere, but no two markets are the same. To simplify online trade around the world, we at OLX Group combine global reach with local knowledge, tailoring online marketplaces to the needs and habits of the people actually using them.
With user-friendly websites and mobile applications, we’ve brought our local approach to more than 30 countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, and Poland. Beyond our OLX marketplace for local sellers and buyers, we own more than 20 international brands – from South African car selling platform AutoTrader, to Imovirtual, our real estate trading platform in Portugal. With our recruitment platform Waahjobs in India, we even trade in careers!
As you can see, we’re all about trade. And because trading in India is completely different from trading in Peru, our interfaces, features, and marketing approaches are different each time, which makes every OLX-powered marketplace unique.
This brand diversity is testament to our company history and structure. Today’s OLX Group is the result of numerous mergers and acquisitions on a global scale, with new organisations joining us regularly. To keep our local mindset and stay focused on local needs, despite our global scope, we’re empowering our employees worldwide to collaborate anytime, anywhere. That’s what we call our “park bench concept”: if you work at OLX Group, where you do your work should be up to you – and if you’re more productive in your local park, it’s our job to enable you to work from there! By using Okta, we can.
From the first step of our journey with Okta, we were welcomed into a supportive community by the Customer First team. To start things off, Okta delivered a custom help desk course for our admins around the globe, as well as a custom training course for our employees, helping us develop the expertise to make the change as frictionless as possible.
With Okta’s Premier Plus Success Package, we extended our partnership beyond the implementation of our new IAM setup. With a designated Customer Success Manager, who’s always just a call away and has become a real advocate for our company, we’ve developed a mutually agreed success plan to drive continuous value from our investment in Okta. Our Customer Success Manager even organised a trip to Okta HQ to meet the product management team, giving us the opportunity to ask questions, provide feedback, and talk about features we’d like from Okta in the future.
Okta’s great support from the beginning has paid off today. As a SaaS-first organisation, we support our employees with a great variety of cloud tools that make us faster, more productive, and more global. With Okta’s Single Sign-On solution, we give each of our more than 10,000 employees worldwide access to our resources and applications, such as Google Workspace, Zoom, Slack, or Amazon Web Services.
Because we’re constantly welcoming new brands into the OLX family, we’re always in a process of onboarding new companies and their employees. With Okta, connecting the identities of a newly acquired company is a matter of hours, no matter which directory service they use. Whether we add 10 or 10,000 users, we can provide secure access to the technology they need with Okta’s Lifecycle Management. That’s why, whenever we’re adding another company to the family, Okta is the first thing we introduce.
Because their Okta experience is the first impression our new employees get from OLX Group, we must have an intuitive interface for end-users to access their applications in one place. If they forget their passwords, they don’t have to chase IT help staff, but can just use Okta’s self-serve password reset and account unlock features. Automating these processes with Okta doesn’t just make our employees more self-reliant, but saves precious time we used to spend on help desk tasks or password resets, which we can now use to focus on more value generating projects.
Okta’s automation capabilities have made us more secure, too. When we onboard a new company, we can ensure that our Group Standards are in place immediately. We then use Okta’s granular policies for contextual access management to meet any specific country or group entity requirements. By using Okta Workflows to automate processes based on activities, we’ve significantly lowered the risk of unauthorised access. For example, if somebody signs in from a device they haven’t used before, they get a confirmation email. If they respond to that email in the negative, indicating a possible security breach, we easily designed an Okta workflow that locks the user out, resets the password, and messages the security team on a designated Slack channel to report the incident – all automatically.
By making our employees more independent, Okta helps us make OLX Group more flexible. What is invaluable for any organisation became especially important when COVID-19 arrived.
Today, we’re more agile than ever, and ready to further expand our network to shape the future of trade. To make onboarding even easier, we’re hoping to replace our only remaining on-premises element, Active Directory, using Okta’s Universal Directory service. To manage our devices securely, protect enterprise data regardless of the location of our employees, and deliver a better end user experience with fewer MFA prompts, we intend to integrate our Enterprise Device Management solutions with Okta to enable a holistic overview of the assurance level of an authentication request and respond accordingly.
At OLX Group, we really see ourselves as facilitators of growth, helping people get ahead in life with smart, person-to-person trade. That’s why people love our platforms, and that’s why we’re the world’s fastest-growing network of trading platforms. With Okta and constant support from the Customer First team, we’ve found a partner who not only matches our speed, but enables us to go even faster – while making us more secure and user-friendly. In regular roadmap sessions, Okta’s Customer Success Manager helps us strategize for the future and keeps us up to date with new solutions and use cases, making sure we get the most value out of our partnership. We look forward to Okta’s next visit to headquarters, and we’re excited for the new opportunities we can explore together.
