Okta Named A Leader In Forrester’s 2021 Identity as a Service for Enterprise Wave™

There were several reasons I chose to join Okta five months ago. Back in 2010, I witnessed Okta’s founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest gamble on a forward-thinking idea for cloud identity. Since then, Identity-as-a-Service has become a massive category that includes customer identity, workforce identity, and machine identity. Identity today is a critical part of the fabric of our digital experiences, and Okta is committed to delivering an exceptional identity platform for any user, and any technology.

As we further invest in ways our platform can deliver on the promise of identity for our customers, I’m thrilled to share that Okta has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: IDentity as a Service (IDaaS) For Enterprise Wave, Q3 2021. We believe this placement validates our strategy and investment in customer success and innovation and are grateful for the support of our customers, partners, and team in achieving this placement. 

Okta earned the highest scores amongst all vendors evaluated in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories, earning a 5/5 score in 14 of the 18 evaluation criteria. In Forrester’s own words,

“Okta’s IDaaS platform has expansive depth and breadth of pre-built connectors with over 7,000 for SSO (1,600 SAML, 65 OIDC) and over 200 for user provisioning and deprovisioning (SCIM). Okta supports passwordless options, including WebAuthn, and provides NIST-aligned authenticator assurance levels. The solution offers a compelling user experience with self-service access request approvals for users, and no/low code approaches, such as Okta Workflows.”

Diving Deeper on Okta’s 5/5 Scores

When we dive a bit deeper into the report, many of the urgent needs we’ve heard from organisations over the past year, from security to hybrid IT to seamless user experiences, were at the top of the identity evaluation list.

Okta’s foundation has been in delivering a modern, cloud-first identity platform that can be used for any user—employees, partners, contractors, and even customers—as well as any for technology. Our commitment to an integrated, independent, and extensible platform has not changed, but our ecosystem of apps and services in the Okta Integration Network has expanded in both breadth and depth, as Forrester called out in Okta's vendor profile. We’ve invested in the end-to-end journey with these apps and services; today, organisations like Chipotle and Peloton leverage rich integrations with Okta Lifecycle Management and Workflows for powerful automated mover, joiner, and leaver processes.

We also have invested heavily in meeting our customers where they are in their cloud journeys: be they cloud-first, cloud-heavy or hybrid. Many customers such as Avery Dennison and Hitachi are leveraging solutions like the Okta Access Gateway to securely connect into on-premises services from any device or location, while thousands of others also utilise the power duo of Okta Single Sign-On and Okta Multi-Factor Authentication for secure access to SaaS services. When brought together, organisations can apply the same strong security policies and frictionless access experiences with factors like Okta Verify or WebAuthn across both cloud and on-prem applications.

With the Okta Identity Cloud, organisations can balance security, great user experience, and efficient, effective IT processes. Okta earned a 5 out of 5 scores in criteria that deeply impact our customers’ work experience:

• Single sign-on
• Secure access
• User authentication
• User lifecycle management
• User experience and navigation
• Performance & availability

To ensure we’re able to help organisations not only manage the challenges of today but also of the future, we’ve been focused on delivering a vision and roadmap that explores new ways identity can unlock value for our customers. For example, at Oktane21, we highlighted how we’re expanding the Okta Identity Platform into a fully unified Access Management, Identity Governance, and Privileged Access solution; we’ve also introduced Okta FastPass for a true passwordless authentication experience.

We are proud to see that vision resonates with our customers and partners, and, in our opinion, see Forrester’s scores in the strategy category as validation that we’re innovating in the right direction. Okta achieved even more 5/5 scores in areas that we believe highlight this commitment to innovation:

• Product vision
• Innovation roadmap
• Market approach
• Supporting products and services
• Partner ecosystem

We’re not stopping here, though; we also recognise that there’s always room to grow. With our recent release of custom admin roles, plus further investments in Okta Workflows’ identity automation and Okta Identity Governance, we will expand our user directory, reports, and compliance capabilities to better serve our community.

Lastly, in Forrester’s assessment of Market Presence, Okta earned a 5/5 score on all criteria assessed:

• Enterprise IDaaS Revenue
• Enterprise IDaaS Revenue Growth
• Enterprise IDaaS Installed Base

Identity continues to evolve, as do the needs of our customer and partner community. We’re humbled by this recognition, and excited about the next year of innovations to support an even broader set of customer needs. For more market insights and vendor details on the 2021 landscape, you can find the full report from Forrester here.

Click the links for deeper dives into our Workforce Identity solutions referenced above, and the details of our newer investments such as Okta Workflows.