Bitmovin: winning back lost time with Okta

Day one of a new role. Eager to get started, you open your laptop and try to log in. “You have exceeded your login attempts,” says the glowing screen. “Please reset your password and try again.” And so you do — for email, for security, for access management, for HR, and about 20 other things. Those moments we feel “on hold” are ones we’d all rather avoid, and that’s especially true for Bitmovin, a leading provider of video development solutions for global digital media companies and service providers.

As an industry innovator and one of Austria’s top-ranked startups, Bitmovin has taken the lead in the digital video streaming industry since 2012. The company built the world’s first commercial adaptive streaming player and deployed the first software-defined encoding service that runs on any cloud platform. The cloud-native company develops all of its products in-house, offering flexible and scalable media encoding, playback, and analytics solutions that are incredibly easy to integrate and customise. Bingeing your favorite series in 4K from your phone at the end of the day is possible because of them.

But for things to run that smoothly, there’s a lot going on behind the curtain. In Bitmovin’s case, they achieve much of this with the help of Okta’s Workforce Identity, deploying Single Sign-On to integrate applications behind a single portal, Multifactor Authentication to keep it secure, and Lifecycle Management to provision applications and control access rights with one simple login.

With Okta, Bitmovin can refocus its valuable resources on what matters most: integrating and uniting its growing workforce, freeing up its staff to keep your life buffer-free.

Speedy onboarding for a smoother journey

Bitmovin’s team has grown by double digits in just the last year, as it scales to meet an industry demand projected to be valued at $1,690.35 billion by 2029. But as the team evolved across new locations and time zones, its access and authentication processes had to evolve, too. What happens when someone new joins the company or someone moves on? And what happens if their licenses leave with them?

While Bitmovin’s current offboarding process takes no time, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, both onboarding and offboarding were once done manually — creating every new account by hand, then making new users in a time tracking tool, HR account, and more. “In the past, offboarding was really crucial to complete within the hour, but now we just press one button in our HR tool,” says a Senior DevOps Engineer from Bitmovin. “We’re no longer involved, which drastically reduces our workload. Without Okta, we’d still be doing HR onboarding and offboarding manually.”

With Okta’s Lifecycle Management, 90% of the IT services’ onboarding processes can be triggered by Bitmovin’s HR team, who create the initial user and define the account’s lifecycle, with contract start and end dates. An automated process covers the rest, including provisioning — ensuring that the right people have the right access at the right time.

This saves time for Bitmovin’s entire workforce, so they can get cracking on doing great work. “With Okta, you can instantly access important tools and have them all in one place,” says the senior DevOps Engineer. “There's no wait. You don't have to ask anyone. You get them on the first day when you start, and it’s all readily available.”

Centralised access with streamlined security

Bitmovin has integrated 90% of its most critical core applications with Okta to date — but what if every user has a different password for each of those applications? With Single Sign-On (SSO), login issues can all be sorted simultaneously (even if you have 30 different passwords). When users log in with a single set of credentials, they can access all their applications from a single dashboard, making it easier to switch between them without the hassle of multiple passwords.

For Bitmovin’s developers, a single-entry dashboard, with all the tools they need, enables them to figure out customers’ problems quickly and debug features fast without looking for five different bookmarks or resetting their own passwords.

SSO also helps administrators manage access from a central location, improving security and simplifying access management. With Okta, Bitmovin’s centralised user directories allow employees to rely on a unified system, giving Bitmovin a greater awareness, not just of its number of employees, but what they need access to and why. “With just one directory, if we need to give a person instant remote access, it’s super easy to arrange. Okta helps us avoid giving the wrong people the wrong access or giving people more access than they need. With Okta, you can set controlled permission levels, which is really good compared to managing permissions in a dedicated tool.”

This ease of access is made possible and safe by integrating Okta’s Multifactor Authentication (MFA) into Bitmovin’s applications, which uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to determine the level of risk associated with a login attempt, preventing unauthorised access and reducing the risk of data breaches without introducing unnecessary friction into the user experience. This automation makes innovating much easier for Bitmovin’s workforce: no more spending time trying to remember how many special characters you added to your email password. Instead, they can dream of ways to make Bitmovin even better.

A small change goes a long way

Working with Okta and the Austrian partner HXS GmbH, Bitmovin has established identity and access management standards that fully support its mission to shape the future of video on its own terms, holding fast to the research-based and startup roots, which underpin its innovative company culture.

Automating processes like logins, authentication, permissions, and onboarding aren’t just more convenient and quick. They free up Bitmovin’s teams to dream big and assist with feature developments to keep the business at the cutting edge of their industry rather than firefighting IT problems. “Because we are quite a small team with responsibilities spread across different topics, any time and resources we save with a new tool can go towards other development,” says the senior DevOps Engineer.

And as Bitmovin moves to tackle complex cloud directories (for example, integrating into AWS), it will be looking for similarly lean, punchy, and powerful tools to help it keep the journey as buffer-less as possible — both for Bitmovin as a business, and for its millions of customers worldwide.