How Okta helps Shire Pharmaceuticals helps patients lead better lives.

Bob Litterer: Shire's mission is to provide therapies for people with life altering conditions to help them lead better lives.

We're a company that touches almost every aspect that a business can be in. We start at research, we go on to development, we have considerable manufacturing as well for our rare diseases business. We also then have suppliers and supply chain, we have sales, we have marketing, we have the typical business functions. We have it all.

We also have a very diverse group of people outside of Shire that we need to collaborate with. Our IT at Shire needs to be able to evolve from the old models, of inside IT and outside, to one that is much more diverse and mobile and agile. That is what my mission has been since I've been here with Shire; it is to be able to get us positioned to recognize and to excel in a new business model that is a very large departure from what the traditional IT has been.

We went looking for a partner. We needed an identity broker in the cloud. Ones that already have us down, there was no learning curve. They knew how to do identity in the cloud for other providers in the cloud; but standards base, we could easily integrate with our internal environment and hopefully had a very large group of pre-integrated applications that we already used. Also showed agility in being able to bring in others' standard base or even the bespoke systems to work with them; to be able to integrate within that environment.

The adoption of Okta has been very seamless. In fact, we had from a technical perspective the integration synchronization between our directory and Okta- it took 20 minutes. Honestly, maybe 30 minutes at a stretch. It was up and running, in that respect, faster than I thought possible. To the point where I said, "This can't be it. This really can't be it." But it really was it. In some ways you could say that I can see how successful it is because they don't even know we're doing it. I can see from the dashboards I get in Okta how many hundreds of thousands of authentications that have been successful with almost no problems.

Okta for us is a huge enabler and without Okta we would have been very challenged; to be able to help our business now, better address the cloud, for things that we already are doing, and help them reach the cloud to be able to adopt new things that they need to do. Shire can't stand still. Never will stand still in trying to find better ways to serve our patients; and to help them lead better lives. I know that, they know that, I'm going to be prepared for that, and Okta helps me get them there.