Okta helps Enterasys shift IT from maintenance to strategic value

Dan Petlon:  Enterasys has about 1,000 employees globally. We operate in 47 countries, with the main headquarters being here in Salem, New Hampshire. About four years ago, we made the decision we were going to move away from the traditional on-prem software. We were primarily a Microsoft-based shop and moved more and more to pure SaaS cloud applications. We had good experience with our first foray into that and decided to ... that that was the standard and that was really the future to enable us to have this kind of ubiquitous access, any device, anywhere.

Ben Doyle:  Because we had adopted a cloud first IT strategy, we were really looking to facilitate better management and deployment and security around our cloud applications. It became self evident that a cloud-based IAM solution was a good fit for us. We looked at Okta and OneLogin, we talked to Ping and some other vendors to see what would make sense for us. We did a proof of concept and it became very clear that Okta was a good fit, both based on the high quality ofthe product, but also based on the pedigree of the founders of the business and the background. Just really the high commitment to build a world-class, enterprise-grade access and identity solution.

Dan Petlon:  It frees the IT guys from just keeping the lights on and maintaining systems, all those traditional IT things to doing new things, building new applications and adding new value to the business. We've really shifted, both in our hard spend and our people cost. About 65% maintenance, keep the lights on in the old days to now we're only about 30%.

Ben Doyle:  Having true enterprise-grade administration capabilities and security, that was critical to us. Then the resiliency of the platform, the up time and making sure that if we put all of our eggs intothe cloud IAM basket, that that solution would be really enterprise grade and would allow us to keep our business running.

Dan Petlon:  Our vision for identity management, currently, Okta provides all our web application access, both internally and externally, with Active Directory as the back-end master. At some point, I'd like to flip that and have Okta be the master and Active Directory the slave for as long as I still need Active Directory, and then finally retire Active Directory and only have Okta as our cloud-based identity management.

Ben Doyle:  The ways that I like to think about Okta is for any business that is really serious about the cloud and looking at either going all in on the cloud or doing more aggressive or broader cloud rollout, Okta really is the single most impactful thing a business can do to facilitate a rollout of cloud applications. It makes it very easy to provision applications to employees and it makes it easy for IT to have visibility into what's happening with those applications. It's a consistent interface. It really helps a company move to the cloud in a secure way.