How Box found Okta and never looked back
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Jeff Sutton: When I started Box, there was 50 people and Identity Management wasn't a big problem at that point. Once we reached around 150 people, we started noticing a lot of problems. We had 10 new hires a week and adding each of these accounts every week was just taking a lot of time. People were coming up to me, asking for their password resets a lot more, because there was just more people in the company. That's what kind of drove my decision to look for an identity management system.
Before Okta, we used Active Directory and we, for any cloud application that we did have, we would just use the local authentication for the application. So this had tons of challenges because first of all, you're managing your identity in one spot and then you're also managing it in 10 other spots or however many applications you have.
Okta had the greatest support. They helped us all along the way and they just made us feel like a valued customer. I've never seen a software where people love it so much. Usually it's someone saying, "Hey man, that software is just so awesome. I love logging into my applications now." I think people really hated the old way of doing things with passwords and forgetting passwords and having to come to IT all the time to get their credentials or have us reset their credentials. So once they had Okta and it's one password to get in, the rest is just so easy for them that they just can't believe how easy it is.
The number one feature I like about Okta is the two factor authentication, which helps you secure your applications by not only requiring user name and password, but also having an application on your phone that generates a number that you also have to enter in. So this makes it totally secure and no longer relying on just a password, which is very insecure these days.
Provisioning accounts is a feature that Okta has that allows you to create an accountin Active Directory and all of your SAS applications will also get provisioned from the API. We also have a few internal applications that we use, so what's great about Okta is you can use these things called "template apps," and create your own single sign on into these applications.
Given a chance to do it all over again, I would choose Okta in a heartbeat because the competition is just not easy to use, it's not secure, it might be on-premise and I want everything to be in the cloud because that's where I think things are going these days and that's what Okta offers. Okta offers security, ease of use and great user experience and that's what we really need.
When there were only 50 people working at Box, identity management wasn’t a big deal. But once they started hiring ten new people a week, managing the accounts process got difficult. Box tried Active Directory, but found they still needed more from a security solution. Now that they have integrated with Okta, employees love logging in with only one password and the two-factor authentication process. Okta’s security, ease of use, and great user experience makes the difference for Box.