Why did Forest City choose Okta? Ten integrations in 3 days, for starters.
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Billy Heiser: My name is Billy Heiser. I'm the IT Security Manager for ForestCity Enterprises. We are a real estate developer, manager, and owner. ForestCity as a consumer of cloud services quickly realized that will all the credentials and usernames and passwords, it was very difficult for our customers to manage that. We then decided we need a solution like Okta to help us manage that.
When we decided we wanted to go with single sign on, we looked at three solutions including Okta. We gave each of those solutions three applications to show us how they integrate single sign on with those solutions. The first two evaluations were only able to complete two integrations in a two week time period while Okta was able to complete all ten within three days.
Once we decided how to present Okta to our customers, we put a link on our intranet portal that allowed them to log into a My Applications area, which provided them the access to the single sign on. Today, we have over sixty applications in production in Okta. We currently have thirteen more in queue and we receive more requests daily. We have found that Okta, once implemented, requires very little care and feeding. The only effort we really spend on it is implementing new applications.Even implementing those is very quick and easy.
Before implementing Okta, our service desk was receiving thirty to forty password reset phone calls a day, each one of those taking upwards of fifteen minutes, which is a time loss for our business and timeloss for IT. After implementing Okta, those numbers have gone down significantly.
The three things that we like the most about Okta is that it's easy to use, the company has been very supportive of it, and our users love it because it helps them manage one of the most frustrating areas of their jobs.
At our company, we have many, many applications. To make sure that we're getting the best use out of those applications, we do an application rationalization. Part of that is determining the IT value and the business value. When we did that, Okta turned out to be in the top right corner of that quadrant, which indicates high business and high IT value. When we were evaluating Okta, we had heard from another Okta customer that you will actually receive high fives in the hallway. Much to our surprise, we actually did.
Like many other companies, Forest City’s IT department was looking for cloud solution that can help them streamline their user authentication and more importantly, integrating multiple applications into a single sign-on solution. Although approaching Okta with a hint of skepticism, all their concerns were put to rest when our system managed to integrate 10 of their applications in just three days. Now they have over 60 applications in production at Okta and simultaneously, a lot less password management phone calls to deal with.